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THE ASCENT OF DENALI 

(MOUNT MCKINLEY) 




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'^^-' /!« 







THE 
ASCENT OF DENALI 

(MOUNT McKINLEY) 

A NARRATIVE OF THE 

FIRST COMPLETE ASCENT OF THE HIGHEST 

PEAK IN NORTH AMERICA 



BY 

HUDSON STUCK, D.D. 

ARCHDEACON OF THE YUKON 



ILLUSTRATED 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1914 



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C0P\T!TGHT, I914, BY 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published February, 1914 




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€^CIA3C908J 



^0 

SIR MARTIN CONWAY 

ONE OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST TRAVELLERS AND CLIMBERS 

WHOSE FASCINATING NARRATIVES 

HAVE KINDLED IN MANY BREASTS A LOVE OF THE 

GREAT HEIGHTS AND A DESIRE TO ATTAIN UNTO THEM 

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 

WITH RESPECT AND ADMIRATION 



PREFACE 

Forefront in this book, because forefront in 
the author's heart and desire, must stand a plea 
for the restoration to the greatest mountain in 
North America of its immemorial native name. 
If there be any prestige or authority in such 
matter from the accomplishment of a first com- 
plete ascent, "if there be any virtue, if there be 
any praise," the author values it chiefly as it 
may give weight to this plea. 

It is now little more than seventeen years ago 
that a prospector penetrated from the south into 
the neighborhood of this mountain, guessed its 
height with remarkable accuracy at twenty thou- 
sand feet, and, ignorant of any name that it 
already bore, placed upon it the name of the 
Republican candidate for President of the United 
States at the approaching election — William Mc- 
Kinley. No voice was raised in protest, for the 
Alaskan Indian is inarticulate and such white men 
as knew the old name were absorbed in the search 
for gold. Some years later an officer of the United 

vii 



Preface 

States army, upon a reconnoissance survey into 
the land, passed around the companion peak, 
and, ahke ignorant or careless of any native name, 
put upon it the name of an Ohio politician, at that 
time prominent in the councils of the nation, 
Joseph Foraker. So there they stand upon the 
maps, side by side, the two greatest peaks of the 
Alaskan range, "Mount McKinley" and "Mount 
Foraker." And there they should stand no longer, 
since, if there be right and reason in these matters, 
they should not have been placed there at all. 

To the relatively large Indian population of 
those wide regions of the interior of Alaska from 
which the mountains are visible they have always 
borne Indian names. The natives of the middle 
Yukon, of the lower three hundred miles of the 
Tanana and its tributaries, of the upper Kusko- 
kwim have always called these mountains "De- 
nali" (Den-ah'li) and "Denali's Wife"— either 
precisely as here written, or with a dialectical differ- 
ence in pronunciation so sHght as to be negligible. 

It is true that the little handful of natives on 
the Sushitna River, who never approach nearer 
than a hundred miles to the mountain, have an- 
other name for it. They call it TraUika^ which, 
in their wholly different language, has the same 
signification. It is probably true of every great 

viii 



Preface 

mountain that it bears diverse native names as 
one tribe or another, on this side or on that of its 
mighty bulk, speaks of it. But the area in which, 
and the people by whom, this mountain is known 
as Denali, preponderate so greatly as to leave 
no question which native name it should bear. 
The bold front of the mountain is so placed on 
the returning curve of the Alaskan range that 
from the interior its snows are visible far and 
wide, over many thousands of square miles; and 
the Indians of the Xanana and of the Yukon, as 
well as of the Kuskokwim, hunt the caribou well 
up on its foot-hills. Its southern slopes are stern 
and forbidding through depth of snow and vio- 
lence of glacial stream, and are devoid of game; 
its slopes toward the interior of the country are 
mild and amene, with light snowfall and game 
in abundance. 

Should the reader ever be privileged, as the 
author was a few years ago, to stand on the frozen 
surface of Lake Minchumina and see these moun- 
tains revealed as the clouds of a passing snow- 
storm swept away, he would be overwhelmed by 
the majesty of the scene and at the same time 
deeply moved with the appropriateness of the 
simple native names; for simplicity is always a 
quality of true majesty. Perhaps nowhere else 

ix 



Preface 

in the world is so abrupt and great an uplift from 
so low a base. The marshes and forests of the 
upper Kuskokwim, from which these mountains 
rise, cannot be more than one thousand five hun- 
dred feet above the sea. The rough approxima- 
tion by the author's aneroid in the journey from 
the Tanana to the Kuskokwim would indicate a 
still lower level — would make this wide plain little 
more than one thousand feet high. And they 
rise sheer, the tremendous cliffs of them appar- 
ently unbroken, soaring superbly to more than 
twenty thousand and seventeen thousand feet 
respectively: Denali,"the great one," and Denali's 
Wife. And the little peaks in between the na- 
tives call the "children." It was on that occasion, 
standing spellbound at the sublimity of the scene, 
that the author resolved that if it were in his 
power he would restore these ancient moun- 
tains to the ancient people among whom they 
rear their heads. Savages they are, if the reader 
please, since "savage" means simply a forest 
dweller, and the author is glad himself to be a 
savage a great part of every year, but yet, as 
savages, entitled to name their own rivers, their 
own lakes, their own mountains. After all, these 
terms — "savage," "heathen," "pagan" — mean, 
alike, simply "country people," and point to some 

X 



Preface 

old-time superciliousness of the city-bred, now 
confined, one hopes, to such localities as White- 
chapel and the Bowery. 

There is, to the author's mind, a certain ruth- 
less arrogance that grows more offensive to him 
as the years pass by, in the temper that comes 
to a "new" land and contemptuously ignores the 
native names of conspicuous natural objects, 
almost always appropriate and significant, and 
overlays them with names that are, commonly, 
neither the one nor the other. The learned soci- 
eties of the world, the geographical societies, the 
ethnological societies, have set their faces against 
this practice these many years past, and to them 
the writer confidently appeals. 

This preface must bear a grateful acknowledg- 
ment to the most distinguished of Alaskans — the 
man who knows more of Alaska than any other 
human being — Peter Trimble Rowe, seventeen 
years bishop of that immense territory, for the 
"cordial assent" which he gave to the proposed 
expedition and the leave of absence which ren- 
dered it possible — one more in a long list of kind- 
nesses which have rendered happy an association 
of nearly ten years. Nor can better place be 
found for a tribute of gratitude to those who 

xi 



Preface 

were of the little party: to Mr. Harry P. Kar- 
stens, strong, competent, and resourceful, the real 
leader of the expedition in the face of difficulty 
and danger; to Mr. Robert G. Tatum, who took 
his share, and more than his share, of all toil and 
hardship and was a most valuable colleague; to 
Walter Harper, Indian-bred until his sixteenth 
year, and up to that time trained in not much 
else than Henry of Navarre's training, "to shoot 
straight, to speak the truth; to do with little food 
and less sleep" (though equal to an abundance 
of both on occasion), who joyed in the heights as 
a mountain-sheep or a chamois, and whose sturdy 
limbs and broad shoulders were never weary or 
unwilling — to all of these there is heartfelt affec- 
tion and deep obligation. Nor must Johnny be 
forgotten, the Indian boy who faithfully kept the 
base camp during a long vigil, and killed game to 
feed the dogs, and denied himself, unasked, that 
others might have pleasure, as the story will tell. 
And the name of Esaias, the Indian boy who 
accompanied us to the base camp, and then re- 
turned with the superfluous dogs, must be men- 
tioned, with commendation for fidelity and thanks 
for service. Acknowledgment is also made to 
many friends and colleagues at the mission sta- 
tions in the interior, who knew of the purpose 

xii 



Preface 

and furthered it greatly and held their tongues 
so that no premature screaming bruit of it got 
into the Alaskan newspapers: to the Rev. C. E. 
Betticher, Jr., particularly and most warmly. 

The author would add, perhaps quite unneces- 
sarily, yet lest any should mistake, a final personal 
note. He is no professed explorer or climber or 
"scientist," but a missionary, and of these mat- 
ters an amateur only. The vivid recollection of a 
back bent down with burdens and lungs at the 
limit of their function makes him hesitate to 
describe this enterprise as recreation. It was the 
most laborious undertaking with which he was 
ever connected; yet it was done for the pleasure 
of doing it, and the pleasure far outweighed 
the pain. But he is concerned much more with 
men than mountains, and would say, since "out 
of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaketh," 
that his especial and growing concern, these ten 
years past, is with the native people of Alaska, 
a gentle and kindly race, now threatened with 
a wanton and senseless extermination, and sadly 
in need of generous champions if that threat is to 
be averted. 



Xlll 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Preparation and Approach .... 3 

II. The Muldrow Glacier 25 

III. The Northeast Ridge 53 

IV. The Grand Basin 80 

V. The Ultimate Height 92 

VI. The Return 117 

VII. The Height of Denali, with a Dis- 
cussion OF THE Readings on the 
Summit and During the Ascent 141 

VIII. Explorations of the Denali Region 
and Previous Attempts at its 
Ascent 157 

IX. The Names Placed upon the Moun- 
tain BY THE Author 180 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Ice fall of nearly four thousand feet by which the 
upper or Harper Glacier discharges into the lower 
or Muldrow Glacier (photogravure) . . . Frontispiece 

FACING 
FACE 

The author and Mr. H. P. Karstens 4 "^ 

Tatum, Esaias, Karstens, Johnny, and Walter, at the 

Clearwater Camp 8 '-^ 

Striking across from the Tanana to the Kantishna . . 12 * 

One of the abandoned mining towns in the Kantishna 14 "^ 

Denali from the McKinley fork of the Kantishna River 16 ^ 

Entering the range by Cache Creek 18 "'^ 

The base-camp at about 4,000 feet on Cache Creek . 20 \y 

Some heads of game killed at the base-camp .... 22 v^ 

The Muldrow Glacier. Karstens in the foreground . . 26 ' 

Ascension Day, 1913 30 1'' 

Bridging a crevasse on the Muldrow Glacier .... 32 ' 

Hard work for dogs as well as men on the Muldrow / 

Glacier 34 

xvii 



Illustrations 



FACING 
PAGE 



The Northeast Ridge shattered by the earthquake in 

July, 191 2 40 

Cutting a staircase three miles long in the ice of the shat- ^' 

tered ridge 52 

The shattered Northeast Ridge 56 

Camp at 13,000 feet on Northeast Ridge 60 

A dangerous passage 64 

The Upper Basin reached at last. Our camp at the 

Parker Pass at 15,000 feet 72 v'' 

Above all the range except Denali and Denali's Wife 76 ^ 

Traverse under the cliffs of the Northeast Ridge to enter 

the Grand Basin 82 

First camp in the Grand Basin — 16,000 feet, looking up 84 

Second camp in the Grand Basin — looking down, 16,500 

feet 86 

Third camp in the Grand Basin — 17,000 feet, showing the 

shattering of the glacier walls by the earthquake . 88 

The North Peak, 20,000 feet high 90 

The South Peak from about 18,000 feet 94 

The climbing-irons 98 

Denali's Wife from the summit of Denali (photogravure) 102 

Robert Tatum raising the Stars and Stripes on the high- 
est point in North America 104 

xviii 



Illustrations 



FACING 
PAGE 



The saying of the Te Deum io6 "^ 



Beginning the descent of the ridge; looking down 4,000 

feet upon the Muldrow Glacier 122 



^ 



Johnny Fred, who kept the base camp and fed the dogs y 

and would not touch the sugar 128 

"Muk," the author's pet malamute 136 '-^ 

Approaching the range 164 ^ 



Map showing route of the Stuck-Karstens expedition to 
the summit of Mt. Denali (Mt. McKinley) . . . 

End oj volume ^' 



XIX 



THE ASCENT OF DENALI 



THE ASCENT OF DENALI 

CHAPTER I 
PREPARATION AND APPROACH 

THE enterprise which this volume describes 
was a cherished purpose through a number 
of years. In the exercise of his duties as Arch- 
deacon of the Yukon, the author has travelled 
throughout the interior of Alaska, both winter 
and summer, almost continuously since 1904. 
Again and again, now from one distant elevation 
and now from another, the splendid vision of the 
greatest mountain in North America has spread 
before his eyes, and left him each time with a 
keener longing to enter its mysterious fastnesses 
and scale its lofty peaks. Seven years ago, writ- 
ing in The Spirit of Missions of a view of the 
mountain from the Pedro Dome, in the neighbor- 
hood of Fairbanks, he said: "I would rather 
climb that mountain than discover the richest 
gold-mine in Alaska." Indeed, when first he 
went to Alaska it was part of the attraction which 

3 



The Ascent of Denali 

the country held for him that it contained an 
uncHmbed mountain of the first class. 

Scawfell and Skiddaw and Helvellyn had given 
him his first boyish interest in climbing; the 
Colorado and Canadian Rockies had claimed one 
holiday after another of maturer years, but the 
summit of Rainier had been the greatest height 
he had ever reached. When he went to Alaska 
he carried with him all the hypsometrical instru- 
ments that were used in the ascent as well as 
his personal climbing equipment. There was no 
definite likelihood that the opportunit}^ would 
come to him of attempting the ascent, but he 
wished to be prepared with instruments of ade- 
quate scale in case the opportunity should come; 
and Hicks, of London, made them nine years ago. 

Long ago, also, he had picked out Mr. Harry 
P. Karstens, of Fairbanks, as the one colleague 
with whom he would be willing to make the at- 
tempt. Mr. Karstens had gone to the Klondike 
in his seventeenth 3'ear, during the wild stampede 
to those diggings, paying the expenses of the trip 
by packing over the Chilkoot Pass, and had been 
engaged in pioneering and in travel of an arduous 
and adventurous kind ever since. He had mined 
in the Klondike and in the Seventy-Mile (hence 
his sobriquet of "The Seventy-Mile Kid"). It 

4 







H 



Members of the Party 

was he and his partner, McGonogill, who broke 
the first trail from Fairbanks to Valdez and for 
two years of difficulty and danger — dogs and men 
alike starving sometimes — brought the mail regu- 
larly through. When the stampede to the Kan- 
tishna took place, and the government was dila- 
tory about instituting a mail service for the three 
thousand men in the camp, Karstens and his 
partner organized and maintained a private mail 
service of their own. He had freighted with 
dogs from the Yukon to the Iditerod, had 
run motor-boats on the Yukon and the Xanana. 
For more than a year he had been guide to Mr. 
Charles Sheldon, the well-known naturalist and 
hunter, in the region around the foot-hills of 
DenaH. With the full vigor of maturity, with all 
this accumulated experience and the resourceful- 
ness and self-reHance which such experience 
brings, he had yet an almost juvenile keenness 
for further adventure which made him admirably 
suited to this undertaking. 

Mr. Robert G. Tatum, of Tennessee, just 
twenty-one years old, a postulant for holy orders, 
stationed at the mission at Nenana, had been 
employed all the winter in a determined attempt 
to get supplies freighted over the ice, by na- 
tives and their dog teams, to two women mis- 

5 



The Ascent of Denali 

sionaries, a nurse and a teacher, at the Xanana 
Crossing. The steamboat had cached the sup- 
pHes at a point about one hundred miles below 
the mission the previous summer, unable to pro- 
ceed any farther. The upper Tanana is a danger- 
ous and difficult river alike for navigation and for 
ice travel, and Tatum's efforts were made des- 
perate by the knowledge that the women were re- 
duced to a diet of straight rabbits without even 
salt. The famine relieved, he had returned to 
Nenana. The summer before he had worked on 
a survey party and had thus some knowledge of 
the use of instruments. By undertaking the entire 
cooking for the expedition he was most useful 
and helpful, and his consistent courtesy and con- 
siderateness made him a very pleasant comrade. 

Of the half-breed boy, Walter Harper, the au- 
thor's attendant and interpreter, dog driver in 
the winter and boat engineer in the summer for 
three years previous, no more need be said than 
that he ran Karstens close in strength, pluck, and 
endurance. Of the best that the mixed blood can 
produce, twenty-one years old and six feet tall, 
he took gleefully to high mountaineering, while 
his kindliness and invincible amiability endeared 
him to every member of the party. 

The men were thus all volunteers, experienced 
6 



Methods of Approach 

in snow and ice, though not in high-mountain 
work. But the nature of snow and ice is not 
radically changed by Hfting them ten or fifteen 
or even twenty thousand feet up in the air. 

A volunteer expedition was the only one within 
the resources of the writer, and even that strained 
them. The cost of the food supplies, the equip- 
ment, and the incidental expenses was not far 
short of a thousand dollars — a mere fraction of 
the cost of previous expeditions, it is true, but a 
matter of long scraping together for a missionary. 
Yet if there had been unHmited funds at his dis- 
posal — and the financial aspect of the aflPair is 
alluded to only that this may be said — it would 
have been impossible to assemble a more desirable 
party. 

Mention of two Indian boys of fourteen or 
fifteen, who were of great help to us, must not be 
omitted. They were picked out from the elder 
boys of the school at Nenana, all of whom were 
most eager to go, and were good specimens of 
mission-bred native youths. "Johnny" was with 'Ij^^^j ^t 

the expedition from start to finish, keeping the 
base camp while the rest of the party was above; 
Esaias was with us as far as the base camp and 
then went back to Nenana with one of the dog 
teams. 

7 



H H n-*j 



The Ascent of Denali 

The resolution to attempt the ascent of Denali 
was reached a year and a half before it was put 
into execution: so much time was necessary for 
preparation. Almost any Alaskan enterprise that 
calls for suppHes or equipment from the outside 
must be entered upon at least a year in advance. 
The plan followed had been adopted long before 
as the only wise one: that the supplies to be used 
upon the ascent be carried by water as near to 
the base of the mountain as could be reached 
and cached there in the summer, and that the 
climbing party go in with the dog teams as near 
the 1st March as practicable. Strangely enough, 
of all the expeditions that have essayed this as- 
cent, the first, that of Judge Wickersham in 1903, 
and the last, ten years later, are the only ones 
that have approached their task in this natural 
and easy way. The others have all burdened 
themselves with the great and unnecessary diffi- 
culties of the southern slopes of the range. 

It was proposed to use the mission launch 
Pelican^ which has travelled close to twenty thou- 
sand miles on the Yukon and its tributaries in the 
six seasons she has been in commission, to trans- 
port the supplies up the Kantishna and Bearpaw 
Rivers to the head of navigation of the latter, 
when her cruise of 191 2 was complete. But a 

8 



Equipment 

serious mishap to the launch, which it was im- 
possible to repair in Alaska, brought her activities 
for that season to a sudden end. So Mr. Karstens 
came down from Fairbanks with his launch, and 
a poling boat loaded with food staples, and, push- 
ing the poling boat ahead, successfully ascended 
the rivers and carefully cached the stuff some 
fifty miles from the base of the mountain. It was 
done in a week or less. 

Unfortunately, the equipment and suppHes or- 
dered from the outside did not arrive in time to 
go in with the bulk of the stuff. Although or- 
dered in February, they arrived at Tanana only 
late in September, just in time to catch the last 
boat up to Nenana, And only half that had been 
ordered came at all — one of the two cases has not 
been traced to this day. Moreover, it was not 
until late the next February, when actually about 
to proceed on the expedition, that the writer was 
able to learn what items had come and what had 
not. Such are the difficulties of any undertaking 
in Alaska, despite all the precautions that fore- 
sight may dictate. 

The silk tents, which had not come, had to be 
made in Fairbanks; the ice-axes sent were ridic- 
ulous gold-painted toys with detachable heads 
and broomstick handles — more like dwarf hal- 

9 



The Ascent of Denali 

herds than ice-axes; and at least two work- 
manhke axes were Indispensahle. So the head 
of an axe was sawn to the pattern of the writer's 
out of a piece of tool steel and a substantial hick- 
ory handle and an iron shank fitted to it at the 
machine-shop in Fairbanks. It served excellently 
well, while the points of the fancy axes from New 
York splintered the first time they were used. 
"Climbing-irons," or "crampons," were also to 
make, no New York dealer being able to supply 
them. 

One great difficulty was the matter of footwear. 
Heav}^ regulation-nailed alpine boots were sent — 
all too small to be worn with even a couple of 
pairs of socks, and therefore quite useless. In- 
deed, at that time there was no house in New 
York, or, so far as the writer knows, in the United 
States, where the standard alpine equipment could 
be procured. As a result of the dissatisfaction of 
this expedition with the material sent, one house 
in New York now carries in stock a good assort- 
ment of such things of standard pattern and 
qualit}^ Fairbanks was ransacked for boots of 
any kind in which three or four pairs of socks could 
be worn. Alaska is a country of big men accus- 
tomed to the natural spread of the foot which a 
moccasin permits, but we could not find boots to 

10 



Supplies 

our need save rubber snow-packs, and we bought 
half a dozen pairs of them (No. 12) and had 
leather soles fastened under them and nailed. 
Four pairs of alpine boots at eleven dollars a pair 
equals forty-four dollars. Six pairs of snow-packs 
at five dollars equals thirty dollars. Leather soles 
for them at three dollars equals eighteen dol- 
lars; which totalled ninety-two dollars — entirely 
wasted. We found that moccasins were the only 
practicable foot-gear; and we had to put five 
pairs of socks within them before we were done. 
But we did not know that at the time and had 
no means of discovering it. 

All these matters were put in hand under Kar- 
stens's direction, while the writer, only just arrived 
in Fairbanks from Fort Yukon and Xanana, made 
a flying trip to the new mission at the Tanana 
Crossing, two hundred and fifty miles above 
Fairbanks, with Walter and the dog team; and 
most of them were finished by the time we re- 
turned. A multitude of small details kept us sev- 
eral days more in Fairbanks, so that nearly the 
middle of March had arrived before we were ready 
to make our start to the mountain, two weeks 
later than we had planned. 

Karstens having joined us, we went down to 
the mission at Nenana (seventy-five miles) in a 

II 



The Ascent of Denali 

couple of days, and there two more days were 
spent overhauling and repacking the stuff that 
had come from the outside. In the way of food, 
we had imported only erbswurst, seventy-two four- 
ounce packages; milk chocolate, twenty pounds; 
compressed China tea in tablets (a most excel- 
lent tea with a very low percentage of tannin), 
five pounds; a specially selected grade of Smyrna 
figs, ten pounds; and sugared almonds, ten pounds 
— about seventy pounds' weight, all scrupulously 
reserved for the high-mountain work. 

For trail equipment we had one eight-by-ten 
**silk" tent, used for two previous winters; three 
small circular tents of the same material, made in 
Fairbanks, for the high work; a Yukon stove and 
the usual complement of pots and pans and dishes, 
including two admirable large aluminum pots for 
mehing snow, used a number of yea.rs with great 
satisfaction. A "primus" stove, borrowed from 
the Pelican s galley, was taken along for the high 
work. The bedding was mainly of down quilts, 
which are superseding fur robes and blankets for 
winter use because of their lightness and warmth 
and the small compass into which they may be 
compressed. Two pairs of camel's-hair blankets 
and one sleeping-bag lined with down and camel's- 
hair cloth were taken, and Karstens brought a 

12 




/ 



* 




u. 



H 



Start 

great wolf-robe, weighing twenty-five pounds, of 
which we were glad enough later on. 

Another team was obtained at the mission, and 
Mr. R. G. Tatum and the two boys, Johnny and 
Esaias, joined the company, which, thus increased 
to six persons, two sleds, and fourteen dogs, set 
out from Nenana across country to the Kantishna 
on St. Patrick's day. 

Travelling was over the beaten trail to the 
Kantishna gold camp, one of the smallest of 
Alaskan camps, supporting about thirty men. In 
1906 there was a wild stampede to this region, and 
two or three thousand people went in, chiefly 
from the Fairbanks district. Town after town 
was built — Diamond City, Glacier City, Bearpaw 
City, Roosevelt, McKinley City — all with elab- 
orate saloons and gambhng-places, one, at least, 
equipped with electric lights. But next summer 
the boom burst and all the thousands streamed 
out. Gold there was and is yet, but in small quan- 
tities only. The "cities" are mere collections of 
tumble-down huts amongst which the moose roam 
at will. Interior Alaska has many such aban- 
doned "cities." The few men now in the district 
have placer claims that yield a "grub-stake" as a 
sure thing every summer, and spend their winters 
chiefly in prospecting for quartz. At Diamond 

13 



The Ascent of Denali 

City, on the Bearpaw, lay our cache of grub, and 
that place, some ninety miles from Nenana and 
fifty miles from the base of Denali, was our present 
objective point. It was bright, clear weather 
and the trail was good. For thirty miles our 
way lay across the wide flats of the Tanana 
Valley, and this stage brought us to the banks 
of the Nenana River. Another day of twenty- 
five miles of flats brought us to Knight's com- 
fortable road-house and ranch on the Toklat, a 
tributary of the Kantishna, the only road-house 
this trail can now support. Several times during 
these two days we had clear glimpses of the great 
mountain we were approaching, and as we came 
out of the flat country, the "Sheephills," a foot- 
hill range of Denali, much broken and deeply 
sculptured, rose picturesquely before us. Our 
travel was now almost altogether on "overflow" 
ice, upon the surface of swift streams that freeze 
solidly over their riflfles and shallows and thus 
deny passage under the ice to the water of foun- 
tains and springs that never ceases flowing. So it 
bursts forth and flows over the ice with a contin- 
ually renewing surface of the smoothest texture. 
Carrying a mercurial barometer that one dare not 
intrust to a sled on one's back over such footing 
is a somewhat precarious proceeding, but there 

14 




u 



c 

-T3 



C 

o 



The Faces of the Mountain 

was no alternative, and many miles were thus 
passed. Up the Toklat, then up its Clearwater 
Fork, then up its tributary, Myrtle Creek, to its 
head, and so over a little divide and down Willow 
Creek, we went, and from that divide and the 
upper reaches of the last-named creek had fine, 
clear views not only of Denali but of Denali's 
Wife as well, now come much nearer and looming 
much larger. 

But here it may be stated once for all that the 
view which this face of the mountains presents is 
never a satisfying one. The same is true in even 
greater degree of the southern face, all photo- 
graphs agreeing with all travellers as to its tame- 
ness. There is only one face of the Denali group 
that is completely satisfying, that is adequate to 
the full picturesque potentiality of a twenty-thou- 
sand-foot elevation. The writer has seen no other 
view, no other aspect of it, comparable to that 
of the northwest face from Lake Minchumina. 
There the two mountains rise side by side, sheer, 
precipitous, pointed rocks, utterly inaccessible, 
savage, and superb. The rounded shoulders, the 
receding slopes and ridges of the other faces de- 
tract from the uplift and from the dignity, but 
the northwestern face is stark. 

One more run, of much the same character as 
15 



The Ascent of Denali 

the previous day, and we were at Eureka, in the 
heart of the Kantishna country, on Friday, 21st 
March, being Good Friday. 

We arrived there at noon and "called it a day," 
and spent the rest of it in the devotions of that 
august anniversary. Easter eve took us to Gla- 
cier City, and we lay there over the feast, gath- 
ering three or four men who were operating a 
prospecting-drill in that neighborhood for the 
first public worship ever conducted in the Kan- 
tishna camp. Ten miles more brought us to 
Diamond City, on the Bearpaw, where we found 
our cache of food in good condition save that the 
field-mice, despite all precautions, had made ac- 
cess to the cereals and had eaten all the rolled 
oats. 

Amongst the Kantishna miners, who were most 
kindly and generous in their assistance, we were 
able to pick up enough large-sized moccasins to 
serve the members of the party, and we wore 
nothing else at all on the mountain. 

Our immediate task now lay before us. A ton 
and a half of supplies had to be hauled some fifty 
miles across country to the base of the mountain. 
Here the relaying began, stuff being taken ahead 
and cached at some midway point, then another 
load taken right through a day's march, and then 

16 




Pi -s 






c 



^4 



Q i 



Timber-Line 

a return made to bring up the cache. In this way 
we moved steadily though slowly across rolling 
country and upon the surface of a large lake to 
the McKinley Fork of the Kantishna, which 
drains the Muldrow Glacier, down that stream to 
its junction with the Clearwater Fork of the same, 
and up that fork, through its canyon, to the last 
spruce timber on its banks, and there we made a 
camp in an exceedingly pretty spot. The creek 
ran open through a break in the ice in front of 
our tent; the water-ousels darted in and out under 
the ice, singing most sweetly; the willows, all in 
bud, perfumed the air; and Denali soared clear 
and brilliant, far above the range, right in front of 
us. Here at the timber-line, at an elevation of 
about two thousand feet, was the pleasantest camp 
of the whole excursion. During the five days' stay 
here the stuff was brought up and carried forward, 
and a quantity of dry wood was cut and advanced 
to a cache at the mouth of the creek by which 
we should reach the Muldrow Glacier. 

It should be said that the short and easy route 
by which that glacier is reached was discovered 
after much scouting and climbing by McGonogill 
and Taylor in 1910, upon the occasion of the 
"pioneer" attempt upon the mountain, of which 
more will be said by and by. The men in the 

17 



The Ascent of Denali 

Kantishna camp who took part in that attempt 
gave us all the information they possessed, as they 
had done to the party that attempted the moun- 
tain last summer. There has been no need to 
make reconnoissance for routes since these pio- 
neers blazed the way: there is no other practica- 
ble route than the one they discovered. The two 
subsequent climbing parties have followed pre- 
cisely in their footsteps up as far as the Grand 
Basin at sixteen thousand feet, and it is the 
merest justice that such acknowledgment be 
made. 

At our camp the Clearwater ran parallel with the 
range, which rose like a great wall before us. Our 
approach was not directly toward Denali but to- 
ward an opening in the range six or eight miles 
to the east of the great mountain. This opening is 
known as Cache Creek. Passing the willow patch 
at its mouth, where previous camps had been 
made, we pushed up the creek some three miles 
more to its forks, and there established our base 
camp, on loth April, at about four thousand feet 
elevation. A few scrubby willows struggled to 
grow in the creek bed, but the hills that rose from 
one thousand five hundred to two thousand feet 
around us were bare of any vegetation save moss 
and were yet in the main covered with snow. 

i8 




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Game and Its Preparation 

Caribou signs were plentiful everywhere, and we 
were no more than settled in camp when a herd 
appeared in sight. 

Our prime concern at this camp was the gath- 
ering and preserving of a sufficient meat supply 
for our subsistence on the mountain. It was an 
easy task. First Karstens killed a caribou and 
then Walter a mountain-sheep. Then Esaias hap- 
pened into the midst of a herd of caribou as he 
climbed over a ridge, and killed three. That was 
all we needed. Then we went to work preparing 
the meat. Why should any one haul canned pem- 
mican hundreds of miles into the greatest game 
country in the world.'* We made our own pem- 
mican of the choice parts of this tender, juicy meat 
and we never lost appetite for it or failed to enjoy 
and assimilate it. A fifty-pound lard-can, three 
parts filled with water, was set on the stove and 
kept supplied with joints of meat. As a batch 
was cooked we took it out and put more into the 
same water, removed the flesh from the bones, and 
minced it. Then we melted a can of butter, added 
pepper and salt to it, and rolled a handful of the 
minced meat in the butter and moulded it with 
the hands into a ball about as large as a base- 
ball. We made a couple of hundred of such 
balls and froze them, and they kept perfectly. 

19 



The Ascent of Denali 

When all the boiling was done we put in the hocks 
of the animals and boiled down the liquor into five 
pounds of the thickest, richest meat-extract jelly, 
adding the marrow from the bones. With this 
pemmican and this extract of caribou, a package 
of erbswurst and a cupful of rice, we concocted 
every night the stew which was our main food in 
the higher regions. 

Here the instruments were overhauled. The 
mercurial barometer reading by verniers to three 
places of decimals was set up and read, and the 
two aneroids were adjusted to read with it. 
These two aneroids perhaps deserve a word. 
Aneroid A was a three-inch, three-circle instru- 
ment, the invention of Colonel Watkins, of the 
British army, of range-finder fame. It seems 
strange that the advantage of the three-circle 
aneroid is so little known in this country, for its 
three concentric circles give such an open scale 
that, although this particular instrument reads to 
twenty-five thousand feet, it is easy to read as 
small a difference as twenty feet on it. It had 
been carried in the hind sack of the writer's sled 
for the past eight winters and constantly and sat- 
isfactorily used to determine the height of sum- 
mits and passes upon the trails of the interior. 
Aneroid B was a six-inch patent mountain ane- 

20 




r ) u 






o u 

o -s 

°„ 

■^ .5 

I-' M 

O ^ 



H 



The Instruments 

roid, another invention of the same military genius, 
prompted by Mr. Whymper's experiments with 
the aneroid barometer after his return from his 
classic climbs to the summits of the Bolivian An- 
des. Colonel Watkins devised an instrument in 
which by a threaded post and a thumb-screw the 
spring may be relaxed or brought into play at 
will, and the instrument is never in commission 
save when a reading is taken. Then a few turns 
of the thumb-screw bring the spring to bear upon 
the box, its walls expand until the pressure of the 
spring equals the pressure of the atmosphere, the 
reading is taken, and the instrument thrown out 
of operation again — a most ingenious arrangement 
by which it was hoped to overcome some of the 
persistent faults of elastic-chamber barometers. 
The writer had owned this instrument for the past 
ten years, but had never opportunity to test its 
usefulness until now. So, although it read no 
lower than about fifteen inches, he took it with 
him to observe its operation. Lastly, completing 
the hypsometrical equipment, was a boiling-point 
thermometer, with its own lamp and case, read- 
ing to 165° by tenths of a degree. 

Then there were the ice-creepers or crampons to 
adjust to the moccasins — terribly heavy, clumsy 
rat-trap affairs they looked, but they served us 

21 



The Ascent of Dcnali 

well on the higher reaches of the mountain and are, 
if not indispensable, at least most valuable where 
hard snow or ice is to be climbed. The snow- 
shoes, also, had to be rough-locked by lashing a 
wedge-shaped bar of hardwood underneath, just 
above the tread, and screwing calks along the 
sides. Thus armed, they gave us sure footing on 
soft snow slopes, and were particularly useful in 
ascending the glacier. While thus occupied at 
the base camp, came an Indian, his wife and 
child, all the way from Lake Minchumina, per- 
haps one hundred miles' journey, to have the child 
baptized. It was generally known amongst all the 
natives of the region that the enterprise was on 
foot, and "Minchumina John," hoping to meet 
us in the Kantishna, and missing us, had followed 
our trail thus far. It was interesting to specu- 
late how much further he would have penetrated: 
Walter thought as far as the glacier, but I think he 
would have followed as far as the dogs could go 
or until food was quite exhausted. 

Meanwhile, the relaying of the supplies and the 
wood to the base camp had gone on, and the ad- 
vancing of it to a cache at the pass by which we 
should gain the Muldrow Glacier. On 15th April 
Esaias and one of the teams were sent back to 
Nenana. Almost all the stuff we should move 

22 




o 



McPhee Pass 

was already at this cache, and the need for the 
two dog teams was over. Moreover, the trails 
were rapidly breaking up, and it was necessary for 
the boy to travel by night instead of by day on 
his return trip. Johnny and the other dog team 
we kept, because we designed to use the dogs up 
to the head of the glacier, and the boy to keep the 
base camp and tend the dogs, when this was done, 
until our return. So we said good-by to Esaias, 
and he took out the last word that was received 
from us in more than two months. 

The photograph of the base camp shows a 
mountainous ridge stretching across much of the 
background. That ridge belongs to the outer wall 
of the Muldrow Glacier and indicates its general 
direction. Just beyond the picture, to the right, 
the ridge breaks down, and the little valley in 
the middle distance sweeps around, becomes a 
steep, narrow gulch, and ends at the breach in the 
glacier wall. This breach, thus reached, is the 
pass which the Kantishna miners of the ''pioneer" 
expedition discovered and named "McPhee Pass," 
after a Fairbanks saloon-keeper. The name 
should stand. There is no other pass by which 
the glacier can be reached; certainly none at all 
above, and probably no convenient one below. 
Unless this pass were used, it would be necessary 



The Ascent of Denali 

to make the long and difficult journey to the snout 
of the glacier, some twenty miles farther to the 
east, cross its rough terminal moraine, and tra- 
verse all its lower stretch. 

On the nth April Karstens and I wound our 
way up the narrow, steep defile for about three 
miles from the base camp and came to our first 
sight of the Muldrow Glacier, some two thousand 
five hundred feet above camp and six thousand 
three hundred feet above the sea. That day 
stands out in recollection as one of the notable 
days of the whole ascent. There the glacier 
stretched away, broad and level — the road to the 
heart of the mountain, and as our eyes traced its 
course our spirits leaped up that at last we were 
entered upon our real task. One of us, at least, 
knew something of the dangers and difficulties 
its apparently smooth surface concealed, yet to 
both of us it had an infinite attractiveness, for it 
was the highway of desire. 



24 



CHAPTER II 
THE MULDROW GLACIER 

RIGHT opposite McPhee Pass, across the 
glacier, perhaps at this point half a mile 
wide, rises a bold pyramidal peak, twelve thou- 
sand or thirteen thousand feet high, which we 
would like to name Mount Farthing, in honor of 
the memory of a very noble gentlewoman who 
died at the mission at Nenana three years ago, 
unless, unknown to us, it already bear some other 
name.* Walter and our two Indian boys had 
been under her instruction. 

At the base of this peak two branches of the 
glacier unite, coming down in the same general 
direction and together draining the snows of the 
whole eastern face of the mountain. The divid- 
ing wall between them, almost up to their head 
and termination, is one stupendous, well-nigh ver- 
tical escarpment of ice-covered rock towering six 
thousand or seven thousand feet above the glacier 

* I have since learned that this mountain was named Mount 
Brooks by Professor Parker, and so withdraw the suggested name. 

25 



The Ascent of Denali 

floor, the first of the very impressive features of 
the mountain. The other wall of the glacier, 
through a breach in which we reached its surface 
— the right-hand wall as we journeyed up it — con- 
sists of a series of inaccessible cliffs deeply seamed 
with snow gullies and crusted here and there with 
hanging glaciers, the rock formation changing sev- 
eral times as one proceeds but maintaining an 
unbroken rampart. 

Now, it is important to remember that these 
two ridges which make the walls of the Muldrow 
Glacier rise ultimately to the two summits of the 
mountain, the right-hand wall culminating in the 
North Peak and the left-hand wall in the South 
Peak. And the glacier lies between the walls all 
the way up and separates the summits, with this 
qualification — that midway in its course it is in- 
tetiupted by a perpendicular ice-fall of about 
four thousand feet by which its upper portion 
discharges into its lower. It will help the reader 
to a comprehension of the ascent if this rough 
sketch be borne in mind. 

The course of the glacier at the point at which 
we reached it is nearly northeast and southwest 
(magnetic); its surface is almost level and it is 
free of crevasses save at its sides. For three or 
four miles above the pass it pursues its course 

26 



The Muldrow Glacier 

without change of direction or much increase in 
grade; then it takes a broad sweep toward the 
south and grows steep and much crevassed. 
Three miles farther up it takes another and more 
decided southerly bend, receiving two steep but 
short tributaries from the northwest at an ele- 
vation of about ten thousand feet, and finishing 
its lower course in another mile and a half, at 
an elevation of about eleven thousand five hun- 
dred feet, with an almost due north and south 
direction (magnetic). 

A week after our first sight of the glacier, or 
on the 1 8th April, we were camped at about the 
farthest point we had been able to see on that 
occasion — just round the first bend. Our stuflF had 
been freighted to the pass and cached there; then, 
in the usual method of our advance, the camp had 
been moved forward beyond the cache on to the 
glacier, a full day's march. Then the team worked 
backward, bringing up the stuff to the new camp. 
Thus three could go ahead, prospecting and stak- 
ing out a trail for further advance, while two 
worked with the dog team at the freighting. 

For the glacier difficulties now confronted us 
in the fullest degree. Immediately above our 
tent the ice rose steeply a couple of hundred feet, 
and at that level began to be most intricately 

27 



The Ascent of Denali 

crevassed. It took several days to unravel the 
tangle of fissures and discover and prepare a trail 
that the dogs could haul the sleds along. Some- 
times a bridge would be found over against one 
wall of the glacier, and for the next we might 
have to go clear across to the other wall. Some- 
times a block of ice jammed in the jaws of a cre- 
vasse would make a perfectly safe bridge; some- 
times we had nothing upon which to cross save 
hardened snow. Some of the gaps were narrow 
and some wide, yawning chasms. Some of them 
were mere surface cracks and some gave hun- 
dreds of feet of deep blue ice with no bottom visi- 
ble at all. Sometimes there was no natural bridge 
over a crevasse, and then, choosing the narrowest 
and shallowest place in it, we made a bridge, 
excavating blocks of hard snow with the shovels 
and building them up from a ledge below, or pro- 
jecting them on the cantilever principle, one be- 
yond the other from both sides. Many of these 
crevasses could be jumped across by an unen- 
cumbered man on his snow-shoes that could not 
have been jumped with a pack and that the dogs 
could not cross at all. As each section of trail 
was determined it was staked out with willow 
shoots, hundreds of which had been brought up 
from below. And in all of this pioneering work, 

28 



Crevasses 

and, indeed, thenceforward invariably, the rope 
was conscientiously used. Every step of the way 
up the glacier was sounded by a long pole, the 
man in the lead thrusting it deep into the snow 
while the two behind kept the rope always taut. 
More than one pole slipped into a hidden crevasse 
and was lost when vigor of thrust was not matched 
by tenacity of grip; more than once a man was 
jerked back just as the snow gave way beneath 
his feet. The open crevasses were not the danger- 
ous ones; the whole glacier was crisscrossed by cre- 
vasses completely covered with snow. In bright 
weather it was often possible to detect them by a 
slight depression in the surface or by a faint, 
shadowy difference in tint, but in the half-light 
of cloudy and misty weather these signs failed, 
and there was no safety but in the ceaseless prod- 
ding of the pole. The ice-axe will not serve — one 
cannot reach far enough forward with it for 
safety, and the incessant stooping is an unneces- 
sary added fatigue. 

For the transportation of our wood and supplies 
beyond the first glacier camp, the team of six dogs 
was cut into two teams of three, each drawing a 
little Yukon sled procured in the Kantishna, the 
large basket sled having been abandoned. And 
in the movement for%vard, when the trail to a 

29 



The Ascent of Denali 

convenient cache had been established, two men, 
roped together, accompanied each sled, one ahead 
of the dogs, the other just behind the dogs at 
the gee-pole. This latter had also a hauling-line 
looped about his breast, so that men and dogs 
and sled made a unit. It took the combined 
traction power of men and dogs to take the loads 
up the steep glacial ascents, and it was very hard 
work. Once, ** Snowball," the faithful team leader 
of four years past, who has helped to haul my sled 
nearly ten thousand miles, broke through a snow 
bridge and, the belly-band parting, slipped out 
of his collar and fell some twenty feet below to a 
ledge in a crevasse. Walter was let down and 
rescued the poor brute, trembling but uninjured. 
Without the dogs we should have been much de- 
layed and could hardly, one judges, have moved 
the wood forward at all. The work on the glacier 
was the beginning of the ceaseless grind which 
the ascent of Denali demands. 

How intolerably hot it was, on some of these 
days, relaying the stuff up the glacier! I shall 
never forget Ascension Day, which occurred this 
year on the 1st May. Double feast as it was — 
for SS. Philip and James falls on that day — it was 
a day of toil and penance. With the mercurial 
barometer and a heavy pack of instruments and 

30 




Ascension Day, 1913. 



Heavy Hauling 

cameras and films on my back and the rope over 
my shoulder, bent double hauling at the sled, I 
trudged along all day, panting and sweating, 
through four or five inches of new-fallen snow, 
while the glare of the sun was terrific. It seemed 
impossible that, surrounded entirely by ice and 
snow, with millions of tons of ice underfoot, it 
could be so hot. But we took the loads right 
through to the head of the glacier that day, rising 
some four thousand feet in the course of five 
miles, and cached them there. On other days a 
smother of mist lay all over the glacier surface, 
with never a breath of wind, and the air seemed 
warm and humid as in an Atlantic coast city in 
July. Yet again, starting early in the morning, 
sometimes a zero temperature nipped toes and 
fingers and a keen wind cut like a knife. Some- 
times it was bitterly cold in the mornings, insuffer- 
ably hot at noon, and again bitterly cold toward 
night. It was a pity we had no black-bulb, sun- 
maximum thermometer amongst our instruments, 
for one is sure its readings would have been of 
great interest. 

It was a pity, also, that we had no means of 
making an attempt at measuring the rate of 
movement of this glacier — a subject we often dis- 
cussed. The carriage of poles enough to set out 

31 



The Ascent of Denali 

rows of them across the glacier would have greatly 
increased our loads and the time required to trans- 
port them. But it is certain that its rate of move- 
ment is very slow in general, though faster at cer- 
tain spots than at others, and a reason for this 
judgment will be given later. 

The midway cache between our first and last 
glacier camps was itself the scene of a camp we 
had not designed, for on the day we were moving 
finally forward we were too fatigued to press on 
to the spot that had been selected at the head of 
the glacier, and by common consent made a halt 
at the cache and set up the tent there. This is 
mentioned because it had consequences. If we 
had gone through that day and had established 
ourselves at the selected spot, a disaster that befell 
us would, in all probability, not have happened; 
for the next day, instead of moving our camp 
forward, we relayed some stuff and cached it 
where the camp would be made, covering the 
cache with the three small silk tents. Then we 
sat around awhile and ate our luncheon, and 
presently went down for another load. Imagine 
our surprise, upon returning some hours later, 
to see a column of smoke rising from our cache. 
All sorts of wild speculations flew through the 
writer's mind as, in the lead that day, he first 

32 






o 






03 



The Fire on the Glacier 

crested the serac that gave view of the cache. 
Had some mysterious cHmber come over from 
the other side of the mountain and built a fire 
on the glacier? Had he discovered our wood and 
our grub and, perhaps starving, kindled a fire 
of the one to cook the other? Was there really, 
then, some access to this face of the mountain 
from the south? For it is fixed in the mind of 
the traveller in the north beyond eradication that 
smoke must mean man. But ere we had gone 
much farther the truth dawned upon us that our 
cache was on fire, and we left the dogs and the 
sleds and hurried to the spot. Something we 
were able to save, but not much, though we were 
in time to prevent the fire from spreading to our 
far-hauled wood. And the explanation was not 
far to seek. After luncheon Karstens and the 
writer had smoked their pipes, and one or the 
other had thrown a careless match away that had 
fallen unextinguished upon the silk tents that 
covered the cache. Presently a little wind had 
fanned the smouldering fabric into flame, which 
had eaten down into the pile of stuff below, mostly 
in wooden cases. All our sugar was gone, all our 
powdered milk, all our baking-powder, our prunes, 
raisins, and dried apples, most of our tobacco, a 
case of pilot bread, a sack full of woollen socks and 

33 



The Ascent of Denali 

gloves, another sack full of photographic films — all 
were burned. Most fortunately, the food provided 
especially for the high-mountain work had not 
yet been taken to the cache, and our pemmican, 
erbswurst, chocolate, compressed tea, and figs 
were safe. But it was a great blow to us and 
involved considerable delay at a very unfortunate 
time. We felt mortification at our carelessness as 
keenly as we felt regret at our loss. The last thing 
a newcomer would dream of would be danger from 
fire on a glacier, but we were not newcomers, and 
we all knew how ever-present that danger is, more 
imminent in Alaska in winter than in summer. 
Our carelessness had brought us nigh to the ruin- 
ing of the whole expedition. The loss of the 
films was especially unfortunate, for we were thus 
reduced to Walter's small camera with a common 
lens and the six or eight spools of film he had 
for it. 

The next day the final move of the main camp 
was made, and we established ourselves in the 
cirque at the head of the Muldrow Glacier, at an 
elevation of about eleven thousand five hundred 
feet, more than half-way up the mountain. After 
digging a level place in the glacier and setting up 
the tent, a wall of snow blocks was built all round 
it, and a little house of snow blocks, a regular 

34 





o 



O 

13 



O 



Camping Comfort 

Eskimo igloo, was built near by to serve as a 
cache. Some details of our camping may be of 
interest. The damp from the glacier ice had in- 
commoded us at previous camps, coming up 
through skins and bedding when the tent grew 
warm. So at this camp we took further precau- 
tion. The boxes in which our grub had been 
hauled were broken up and laid over the whole 
portion of the floor of the tent where our bed was; 
over this wooden floor a canvas cover was laid, and 
upon this the sun-dried hides of the caribou and 
mountain-sheep we had killed were placed. There 
was thus a dry bottom for our bedding, and we 
were not much troubled thenceforward by the 
rising moisture, although a camp upon the ice is 
naturally always a more or less sloppy place. The 
hides were invaluable; heavy as they were, we 
carried them all the way up. 

So soon as we were thus securely lodged, elated 
when we thought of our advance, but downcast 
when we recalled our losses, we set ourselves to 
repair the damage of the fire so far as it was rep- 
arable. Walter and Johnny must go all the way 
down to the base camp and bring up sled-covers 
out of which to construct tents, must hunt the 
baggage through for old socks and mitts, and 
must draw upon what grub had been left for 

35 



The Ascent of Denali 

the return journey to the extreme limit it was 
safe to do so. 

Karstens, accustomed to be clean-shaven, had 
been troubled since our first glacier camp with an 
affection of the face which he attributed to "in- 
growing whiskers," but when many hairs had been 
plucked out with the tweezers and he was nothing 
bettered, but rather grew worse and the inflam- 
mation spread to neck and temple, it was more 
correctly attributed to an eczema, or tetter, caused 
by the glare of the sun. So he was not loath to 
seclude himself for a few days in the tent while we 
set about the making of socks and mitts from the 
camel's-hair Hning of the sleeping-bag. Walter's 
face was also very sore from the sun, his lips in 
particular being swollen and blistered. So pain- 
ful did they become that I had to cut lip covers 
of surgeon's plaster to protect them. Then the 
boys returned with the sorry gleanings of the 
base camp, and the business of making two 
tents from the soiled and torn sled-covers and 
darning worn-out socks and mittens, was put in 
hand. Our camp looked like a sweat-shop those 
days, with its cross-legged tailormen and its lit- 
ter of snippets. In addition to the six-by-seven 
tent, three feet six inches high, in which we were 
to live when we left the glacier, we made a small, 

36 



Amber Glasses 

conical tent in which to read the instruments on 
the summit. And all those days the sun shone 
in a clear sky! 

Here, since reference has just been made to the 
effect of the sun's glare on the face of one member 
of the party, it may be in place to speak of the 
perfect eye protection which the amber snow- 
glasses afforded us. Long experience with blue 
and smoke-colored glasses upon the trail in spring 
had led us to expect much irritation of the eyes 
despite the use of snow-glasses, and we had plen- 
tifully provided ourselves with boracic acid and 
zinc sulphate for eye-washes. But the amber 
glasses, with their yellow celluloid side-pieces, were 
not a mere palliative, as all other glasses had been 
in our experience, but a complete preventive of 
snow-bHndness. No one of us had the slightest 
trouble with the eyes, and the eye-washes were 
never used. It is hard for any save men com- 
pelled every spring to travel over the dazzhng 
snows to realize what a great boon this newly dis- 
covered amber glass is. There is no reason any- 
where for any more snow-blindness, and there is 
no use anywhere for any more blue or smoked 
glasses. The invention of the amber snow-glass 
is an even greater blessing to the traveller in the 
north than the invention of the thermos bottle. 

37 



The Ascent of Denali 

No test could be more severe than that which we 
put these glasses to. 

We were now at the farthest point at which it 
was possible to use the dogs, at our actual climb- 
ing base, and the time had come for Johnny and 
the dogs to go down to the base camp for good. 
We should have liked to keep the boy, so good- 
natured and amiable he was and so keen for 
further climbing; but the dogs must be tended, 
and the main food for them was yet to seek on 
the foot-hills with the rifle. So on 9th May down 
they went, Tatum and the writer escorting them 
with the rope past the crevasses as far as the first 
glacier camp, and then toiling slowly up the glacier 
again, thankful that it was for the last time. That 
was one of the sultriest and most sweltering days 
either of us ever remembered, a moist heat of 
sun beating down through vapor, with never a 
breath of breeze — a stifling, stewing day that, with 
the steep climb added, completely exhausted and 
prostrated us. 

It is important that the reader should be able 
to see, in his mind's eye, the situation of our 
camp at the head of the glacier, because to do 
so is to grasp the simple orography of this face 
of the mountain, and to understand the route of 
its ascent, probably the only route by which it 

38 



The Great Ice-Fall 

can be ascended. Standing beside the tent, fac- 
ing in the direction we have journeyed, the great 
highway of the glacier comes to an abrupt end, 
a cul-de-sac. On the right hand the wall of the 
glacier towers up, with enormous precipitous cliffs 
incrusted with hanging ice, to the North Peak 
of the mountain, eight or nine thousand feet 
above us. About at right angles to the end of 
the glacier, and four thousand feet above it, is 
another glacier, which discharges by an almost per- 
pendicular ice-fall upon the floor of the glacier be- 
low.* The left-hand wall of the glacier, described 
some pages back as a stupendous escarpment of 
ice-covered rock, breaks rapidly down into a 
comparatively low ridge, which sweeps to the 
right, encloses the head of the glacier, and then 
rises rapidly to the glacier above, and still rises to 
form the left-hand wall of that glacier, and finally 
the southern or higher peak of the mountain. 

So the upper glacier separates the two great 
peaks of the mountain and discharges at right 
angles into the lower glacier. And the walls of 
the lower glacier sweep around and rise to form 
the walls of the upper glacier, and ultimately the 
summits of the mountain. To reach the peaks 
one must first reach the upper glacier, and the 

*See frontispiece. 

39 



The Ascent of Denali 

southern or left-hand wall of the lower glacier, 
where it breaks down into the ridge that encloses 
the head of the glacier, is the only possible means 
by which the upper basin may be reached. This 
ridge, then, called by Parker and Browne the 
Northeast Ridge (and we have kept that designa- 
tion, though with some doubt as to its correct- 
ness), presented itself as the next stage in our 
climb. 

Now just before leaving Fairbanks we had re- 
ceived a copy of a magazine containing the ac- 
count of the Parker-Browne climb, and in that 
narrative Mr. Browne speaks of this Northeast 
Ridge as "a steep but practicable snow slope," 
and prints a photograph which shows it as such. 
To our surprise, when we first reached the head of 
the glacier, the ridge offered no resemblance what- 
ever to the description or the photograph. The 
upper one-third of it was indeed as described, but 
at that point there was a sudden sharp cleavage, 
and all below was a jumbled mass of blocks of 
ice and rock in all manner of positions, with here 
a pinnacle and there a great gap. Moreover, the 
floor of the glacier at its head was strewn with 
enormous icebergs that we could not understand 
at all. All at once the explanation came to us — 
*'thc earthquake"! The Parker-Browne party 

40 



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Last Year's Earthquake 

had reported an earthquake which shook the 
whole base of the mountain on 6th July, 191 2, 
two days after they had come down, and, as was 
learned later, the seismographic instruments at 
Washington recorded it as the most severe shock 
since the San Francisco disturbance of 1906. 
There could be no doubt that the earthquake had 
disrupted this ridge. The huge bergs all around 
us were not the normal discharge of hanging 
glaciers as we had at first wonderingly supposed; 
they were the Incrustation of ages, maybe, ripped 
off the rocks and hurled down from the ridge by 
this convulsion. It was as though, as soon as 
the Parker-Browne party reached the foot of the 
mountain, the ladder by which they had ascended 
and descended was broken up. 

What a wonderful providential escape these 
three men, Parker, Browne, and LeVoy had! 
They reached a spot within three or four hundred 
feet of the top of the mountain, struggling gal- 
lantly against a blizzard, but were compelled at 
last to beat a retreat. Again from their seven- 
teen-thousand-foot camp they essayed it, only 
to be enshrouded and defeated by dense mist. 
They would have waited in their camp for fair 
weather had they been provided with food, 
but their stomachs would, not retain the canned 

41 



The Ascent of Denali 

pemmican they had carried laboriously aloft, and 
they were compelled to give up the attempt and 
descend. So down to the foot of the mountain 
they went, and immediately they reached their 
base camp this awful earthquake shattered the 
ridge and showered down bergs on both the 
upper and lower glaciers. Had their food served 
they had certainly remained above, and had they 
remained above their bodies would be there now. 
Even could they have escaped the avalanching 
icebergs they could never have descended that 
ridge after the earthquake. They would either 
have been overwhelmed and crushed to death 
instantly or have perished by starvation. One 
cannot conceive grander burial than that which 
lofty mountains bend and crack and shatter to 
make, or a nobler tomb than the great upper 
basin of Denali; but life is sweet and all men are 
loath to leave it, and certainly never men who 
cling to life had more cause to be thankful. 

The difficulty of our task was very greatl)^ in- 
creased; that was plain at a glance. This ridge, 
that the pioneer climbers of 1910 went up at one 
march with climbing-irons strapped beneath their 
moccasins, carrying nothing but their flagpole, 
that the Parker-Browne party surmounted in a 
few days, relaying their camping stuflP and supplies, 

42 



Glacier Movement 

was to occupy us for three weeks while we hewed 
a staircase three miles long in the shattered ice. 

It was the realization of the earthquake and of 
what it had done that convinced us that this 
Muldrow Glacier has a very slow rate of move- 
ment. The great blocks of ice hurled down from 
above lay apparently just where they had fallen 
almost a year before. At the points of sharp 
descent, at the turns in its course, at the points 
where tributary glaciers were received, the move- 
ment is somewhat more rapid. We saw some 
crevasses upon our descent that were not in exist- 
ence when we went up. But for the whole stretch 
of it we were satisfied that a very few feet a year 
would cover its movement. No doubt all the 
glaciers on this side of the range are much more 
sluggish than on the other side, where the great 
precipitation of snow takes place. 

We told Johnny to look for us in two weeks. 
It was thirty-one days ere we rejoined him. 
For now began the period of suspense, of hope 
blasted anew nearly every morning, the period of 
weary waiting for decent weather. With the whole 
mountain and glacier enveloped in thick mist it 
was not possible to do anything up above, and 
day after day this was the condition, varied by 
high wind and heavy snow. From the inexhausti- 

43 



The Ascent of Denali 

ble cisterns of the Pacific Ocean that vapor was 
distilled, and ever it rose to these mountains and 
poured all over them until every valley, every 
glacier, every hollow, was filled to overflowing. 
There seemed sometimes to us no reason why the 
process should not go on forever. The situation 
was not without its ludicrous side, when one had 
the grace to see it. Here were four men who had 
already passed through the long Alaskan winter, 
and now, when the rivers were breaking and the 
trees bursting into leaf, the flowers spangling 
every hillside, they were deliberately pushing 
themselves up into the winter still, with the long- 
expected summer but a day's march away. 

The tedium of lying in that camp while snow- 
storm or fierce, high wind forbade adventure upon 
the splintered ridge was not so great to the 
writer as to some of the other members of the 
expedition, for there was always Walter's edu- 
cation to be prosecuted, as it had been prosecuted 
for three winters on the trail and three summers 
on the launch, in a desultory but not altogether 
unsuccessful manner. An hour or two spent in 
writing from dictation, another hour or two in 
reading aloud, a little geography and a little his- 
tory and a little physics made the day pass busily. 
A pupil is a great resource. Karstens was con- 

44 



The Language of Commerce 

tinually designing and redesigning a motor-boat 
in which one engine should satisfactorily operate 
twin screws; Tatum learned the thirty-nine articles 
by heart; but naval architecture and even con- 
troversial divinity palled after a while. The equip- 
ment and the supplies for the higher region were 
gone over again and again, to see that all was 
properly packed and in due proportion. 

As one handled the packages and read and re- 
read the labels, one was struck by the meagre 
English of merchandisers and the poor verbal re- 
sources of commerce generally. A while ago bus- 
iness dealt hardly with the word "proposition." 
It was the universal noun. Everything that busi- 
ness touched, however remotely, was a "proposi- 
tion." When last he was "outside" the writer 
heard the Nicene creed described as a "tough 
proposition"; the Vice-President of the United 
States as a "cold-blooded proposition," and mis- 
sionaries in Alaska generally as "queer proposi- 
tions." Now commerce has discovered and ap- 
propriated the word "product" and is working it 
for all it is worth. The coffee in the can calls 
itself a product. The compressed medicines from 
London direct you to "dissolve one product" in 
so much water; the vacuum bottles inform you 
that since they are a "glass product" they will not 

45 



The Ascent of Denali 

guarantee themselves against breakage; the tea 
tablets and the condensed pea soup affirm the 
purity of "these products"; the powdered milk is 
a little more explicit and calls itself a "food prod- 
uct." One feels disposed to agree with Humpty 
Dumpty, in "Through the Looking-Glass," that 
when a word is worked as hard as this it ought to 
be paid extra. One feels that "product" ought 
to be coming round on Saturday night to collect 
its overtime. The zwieback amuses one; it is a 
West-coast "product," and apparently "product" 
has not yet reached the West coast — it does not so 
dignify itself. But it urges one, in great letters on 
every package, to "save the end seals; they are 
valuable!" Walter finds that by gathering one 
thousand two hundred of these seals he would be 
entitled to a " rolled-gold " watch absolutely free! 
This zwieback was the whole stock of a Yukon 
grocer purchased when the supply we ordered did 
not arrive. The writer was reminded of the time 
when he bought several two-pound packages of 
rolled oats at a little Yukon store and discovered 
to his disgust that every package contained a china 
cup and saucer that must have weighed at least 
a pound. One can understand the poor Indian 
being thus deluded into the belief that he is get- 
ting his crockery for nothing, but it is hard to 

46 



"Talcum and Glucose" 

understand how the ** gift-enterprise" and ''pre- 
mium-package" folly still survives amongst white 
people — and Indians do not eat zwieback. What 
sort of people are they who will feverishly purchase 
and consume one thousand two hundred packages 
of zwieback in order to get a "rolled-gold" watch 
for nothing? A sack of corn-meal takes one's eye 
mainly by the enumeration of the formidable proc- 
esses which the "product" inside has survived. 
It is announced proudly as "degerminated, gran- 
ulated, double kiln-dried, steam-ground"! But 
why, in the name even of an adulterous and adul- 
terating generation, should rice be "coated with 
talcum and glucose," as this sack unblushingly 
confesses? It is all very well to add "remove by 
washing"; that is precisely what we shall be un- 
able to do. It will take all the time and fuel we 
have to spare to melt snow for cooking, when 
one little primus stove serves for all purposes. 
When we leave this camp there will be no more 
water for the toilet; we shall have to cleanse our 
hands with snow and let our faces go. The rice 
will enter the pot unwashed and will transfer its 
talcum and glucose to our intestines. Nor is 
this the case merely on exceptional mountain- 
climbing expeditions; it is the general rule during 
the winter throughout Alaska. It takes a long 

47 



The Ascent of Denali 

time and a great deal of snow and much wood 
to produce a pot of water on the winter trail. 
That "talcum-and-glucose" abomination should 
be taken up by the Pure Food Law authorities. 
All the rice that comes to Alaska is so labelled. 
The stomachs and bowels of dogs and men in the 
country are doubtless gradually becoming "coated 
with talcum and glucose." 

It was during this period of hope deferred that 
we began to be entirely without sugar. Perhaps 
by the ordinary man anywhere, certainly by the 
ordinary man in Alaska, where it is the rule to 
include as much sugar as flour in an outfit, dep- 
rivation of sugar is felt more keenly than depri- 
vation of any other article of food. We watched 
the gradual dwindling of our little sack, replen- 
ished from the base camp with the few pounds we 
had reserved for our return journey, with sinking 
hearts. It was kept solely for tea and coffee. 
We put no more in the sour dough for hot cakes; 
we ceased its use on our rice for breakfast; we gave 
up all sweet messes. Tatum attempted a pudding 
without sugar, putting vanilla and cinnamon and 
one knows not what other flavorings in it, in the 
hope of disguising the absence of sweetness, but 
no one could eat it and there was much jeering at 
the cook. Still it dwindled and dwindled. Two 

48 



Sugar 

spoonfuls to a cup were reduced by common con- 
sent to one, and still it went, until at last the day 
came when there was no more. Our cocoa be- 
came useless — we could not drink it without sugar; 
our consumption of tea and coffee diminished — 
there was little demand for the second cup. And 
we all began to long for sweet things. We tried 
to make a palatable potation from some of our 
milk chocolate, reserved for the higher work and 
labelled, "For eating only." The label was ac- 
curate; it made a miserable drink, the milk taste 
entirely lacking, the sweetness almost gone. We 
speculated how our ancestors got on without sugar 
when it was a high-priced luxury brought pain- 
fully in small quantities from the Orient, and as- 
sured one another that it was not a necessary 
article of diet. At last we all agreed to Karstens's 
laconic advice, "Forget it!" and we spoke of sugar 
no more. When we got on the ridge the chocolate 
satisfied to some extent the craving for sweetness, 
but we all missed the sugar sorely and continued 
to miss it to the end, Karstens as much as any- 
body else. 

Our long detention here made us thankful for 
the large tent and the plentiful wood supply. 
That wood had been hauled twenty miles and 
rais'ed nearly ten thousand feet, but it was worth 

49 



The Ascent of Denali 

while since it enabled us to "weather out the 
weather" here in warmth and comparative com- 
fort. The wood no more than served our need; 
indeed, we had begun to economize closely before 
we left this camp. 

We were greatly interested and surprised at the 
intrusion of animal life into these regions totally 
devoid of any vegetation. A rabbit followed us 
up the glacier to an elevation of ten thousand feet, 
gnawing the bark from the willow shoots with 
which the trail was staked, creeping round the 
crevasses, and, in one place at least, leaping such a 
gap. At ten thousand feet he turned back and 
descended, leaving his tracks plain in the snow. 
We speculated as to what possible object he could 
have had, and decided that he was migrating 
from the valley below, overstocked with rabbits 
as it was, and had taken a wrong direction for his 
purpose. Unless the ambition for first ascents 
have reached the leporidae, this seems the only 
explanation. 

At this camp at the head of the glacier we saw 
ptarmigan on several occasions, and heard their 
unmistakable cry on several more, and once we 
felt sure that a covey passed over the ridge above 
us and descended to the other glacier. It was 
always in thick weather that these birds were 

50 



Avalanches 

noticed at the glacier head, and we surmised that 
perhaps they had lost their way in the cloud. 

But even this was not the greatest height at 
which bird life was encountered. In the Grand 
Basin, at sixteen thousand five hundred feet, Wal- 
ter was certain that he heard the twittering of 
small birds familiar throughout the winter in 
Alaska, and this also was in the mist. I have 
never known the boy make a mistake in such 
matters, and it is not essentially improbable. 
Doctor Workman saw a pair of choughs at twenty- 
one thousand feet, on Nun Kun in the Himalayas. 

Our situation on the glacier floor, much of the 
time enveloped in dense mist, was damp and cold 
and gloomy. The cliffs around from time to time 
discharged their unstable snows in avalanches 
that threw clouds of snow almost across the wide 
glacier. Often we could see nothing, and the noise 
of the avalanches without the sight of them was 
at times a little alarming. But the most notable 
discharges were those from the great ice-fall, 
and the more important of them were startling 
and really very grand sights. A slight movement 
would begin along the side of the ice, in one of 
the gullies of the rock, a little trickling and 
rattling. Gathering to itself volume as it de- 
scended, it started ice in other gullies and pres- 

51 



The Ascent of Denali 

ently there was a roar from the whole face of the 
enormous hanging glacier, and the floor upon 
which the precipitation descended trembled and 
shook with the impact of the discharge. Dense 
volumes of snow and ice dust rose in clouds thou- 
sands of feet high and slowly drifted down the 
glacier. We had chosen our camping-place to be 
out of harm's way and were really quite safe. We 
never saw any large masses detached, and by the 
time the ice reached the glacier floor it was all 
reduced to dust and small fragments. One does 
not recall in the reading of mountaineering books 
any account of so lofty an ice-fall. 



52 



CHAPTER III 

THE NORTHEAST RIDGE 

SOME of the photographs we succeeded in get- 
ting will show better than any words the 
character of the ridge we had to climb to the 
upper basin by. The lowest point of the ridge 
was that nearest our camp. To reach its crest 
at that point, some three hundred feet above the 
glacier, was comparatively easy, but when it was 
reached there stretched ahead of us miles and miles 
of ice-blocks heaved in confusion, resting at in- 
secure angles, poised, some on their points, some 
on their edges, rising in this chaotic way some 
3,000 feet. Here one would have to hew steps up 
and over a pinnacle, there one must descend 
again and cut around a great slab. Our wisest 
course was to seek to reach the crest of the ridge 
much further along, beyond as much of this ice 
chaos as possible. But it was three days be- 
fore we could find a way of approach to the crest 
that did not take us under overhanging icebergs 
that threatened continually to fall upon our heads, 
as the overhanging hill threatened Christian in 

53 



The Ascent of Denali 

the "Pilgrim's Progress." At last we took straight 
up a steep gully, half of it snow slope, the upper 
half ice-incrusted rock, and hewed steps all the 
five hundred feet to the top. Here we were about 
half a mile beyond the point at which we first 
attained the crest, with that half mile of ice- 
blocks cut out, but beyond us the prospect loomed 
just as difficult and as dangerous. We could cut 
out no more of the ridge; we had tried place after 
place and could reach it safely at no point further 
along. The snow slopes broke off with the same 
sharp cleavage the whole ridge displayed two 
thousand five hundred feet above; there was no 
other approach. 

So our task lay plain and onerous, enormously 
more dangerous and laborious than that which 
our predecessors encountered. We must cut steps 
in those ice-blocks, over them, around them, on 
the sheer sides of them, under them — whatever 
seemed to our judgment the best way of circum- 
venting each individual block. Every ten yards 
presented a separate problem. Here was a sharp 
black rock standing up in a setting of ice as thin 
and narrow and steep as the claws that hold the 
ston« in a finger-ring. That ice must be chopped 
down level, and then steps cut all round the rock. 
It took a solid hour to pass that rock. Here was 

54 



The Shattered Ridge 

a great bluff of ice, with snow so loose and at 
such a sharp angle about it that passage had to 
be hewed up and over and down it again. On 
either side the ridge fell precipitously to a glacier 
floor, with yawning crevasses half-way down ea- 
gerly swallowing ever}^ particle of ice and snow 
that our axes dislodged: on the right hand to the 
west fork of the Muldrow Glacier, by which we 
had journeyed hither; on the left to the east fork 
of the same, perhaps one thousand five hundred 
feet, perhaps two thousand feet lower. At the gap 
in the ridge, with the ice gable on the other 
side of it, the difficulty and the danger were per- 
haps at their greatest. It took the best part of 
a day's cutting to make steps down the slope 
and then straight up the face of the enormous ice 
mass that confronted us. The steps had to be 
made deep and wide; it was not merely one pas- 
sage we were making; these steps would be 
traversed again and again by men with heavy 
packs as we relayed our food and camp equipage 
along this ridge, and we were determined from 
the first to take no unnecessary risks whatever. 
We realized that the passage of this shattered 
ridge was an exceedingly risky thing at best. 
To go along it day after day seemed like tempting 
Providence. We were resolved that nothing on 

55 



The Ascent of Denali 

our part should be lacking that could contribute 
to safety. Day by day we advanced a little 
further and returned to camp. 

The weather doubled the time and the tedium 
of the passage of this ridge. From Whitsunday 
to Trinity Sunday, inclusive, there were only two 
days that we could make progress on the ridge 
at all, and on one of those days the clouds from 
the coast poured over so densely and enveloped 
us so completely that it was impossible to see 
far enough ahead to lay out a course wisely. On 
that day we toppled over into the abyss a mass of 
ice, as big as a two-story house, that must have 
weighed hundreds of tons. It was poised upon 
two points of another ice mass and held upright 
by a flying buttress of wind-hardened snow. 
Three or four blows from Karstens's axe sent it 
hurling downward. It passed out of our view 
into the cloud-smother immediately, but we heard 
it bound and rebound until it burst with a report 
like a cannon, and some days later we saw its 
fragments strewn all over the flat two thousand 
feet below. What a sight it must have been last 
July, when the whole ridge was heaving, shat- 
tering, and showering down its bergs upon the 
glacier floors! One day we were driven off the 
ridge by a high wind that threatened to sweep 

56 




The shattered Northeast Ridge. 



The Hall of the Mountain King 

us from our footholds. On another, a fine morn- 
ing gave place to a sudden dense snow-storm that 
sent us quickly below again. Always all day long, 
while we were on that ridge, the distant thunder 
of avalanches resounded from the great basin far 
above us, into which the two summits of Denali 
were continually discharging their snows. It 
sounded as though the King of Denmark were 
drinking healths all day long to the salvoes of 
his artillery — that custom "more honored in the 
breach than in the observance." From such fancy 
the mind passed easily enough to the memory of 
that astonishing composition of Grieg's, "In the 
Hall of the Mountain King," and, once recalled, 
the stately yet staccato rhythm ran in one's ears 
continually. For if we had many days of cloud 
and smother of vapor that blotted out everything, 
when a fine day came how brilliant beyond all 
that lower levels know it was! From our perch 
on that ridge the lofty peaks and massive ridges 
rose on every side. As little by little we gained 
higher and higher eminence the view broadened, 
and ever new peaks and ridges thrust themselves 
into view. We were within the hall of the moun- 
tain kings indeed; kings nameless here, in this 
multitude of lofty summits, but that elsewhere in 
the world would have each one his name and story. 

57 



The Ascent of Denali 

And how eager and impatient we were to rise 
high enough, to progress far enough on that 
ridge that we might gaze into the great basin it- 
self from which the thunderings came, the spacious 
hall of the two lords paramount of all the moun- 
tains of the continent — the north and south peaks 
of Denali! Our hearts beat high with the antici- 
pation not only of gazing upon it but of entering 
it and pitching our tent in the midst of its august 
solitudes. To come down again — for there was 
as yet no spot reached on that splintered back- 
bone where we might make a camp — to pass day 
after day in our tent on the glacier floor waiting 
for the bad weather to be done that we might 
essay it again; to watch the tantalizing and, as it 
seemed, meaningless fluctuations of the barom- 
eter for encouragement; to listen to the driving 
wind and the swirling snow, how tedious that 
was! 

At last when we had been camped for three 
weeks at the head of the glacier, losing scarce an 
hour of usable weather, but losing by far the 
greater part of the time, when the advance party 
the day before had reached a tiny flat on the ridge 
where they thought camp could be made, we took 
a sudden desperate resolve to move to the ridge 
at any cost. All the camp contained that would 

S8 



Camp on the Ridge 

be needed above was made up quickly into four 
packs, and we struck out, staggering under our 
loads. Before we reached the first slope of the 
ridge each man knew in his heart that we were 
attempting altogether too much. Even Karstens, 
who had packed his "hundred and a quarter" 
day after day over the Chilkoot Pass in 1897, 
admitted that he was "heavy." But we were 
saved the chagrin of acknowledging that we had 
undertaken more than we could accomplish, for 
before we reached the steep slope of the ridge a 
furious snow-storm had descended upon us and we 
were compelled to return to camp. The next day 
we proceeded more wisely. We took up half the 
stuff and dug out a camping-place and pitched the 
little tent. Every step had to be shovelled out, 
for the previous day's snow had filled it, as had 
happened so many times before, and it took five 
and one-half hours to reach the new camping- 
place. On Sunday, 25th May, the first Sunday 
after Trinity, we took up the rest of the stuff, 
and established ourselves at a new climbing base, 
about thirteen thousand feet high and one thou- 
sand five hundred feet above the glacier floor, 
not to descend again until we descended for good. 
We were now much nearer our work and it 
progressed much faster, although as the ridge rose 

59 



The Ascent of Denali 

it became steeper and steeper and even more 
rugged and chaotic, and the difficulty and danger 
of its passage increased. Our situation up here 
was decidedly pleasanter than below. We had in- 
deed exchanged our large tent for a small one in 
which we could sit upright but could not stand, 
and so narrow that the four of us, lying side by 
side, had to make mutual agreement to turn over; 
our comfortable wood-stove for the little kerosene 
stove; yet when the clouds cleared we had a noble, 
wide prospect and there was not the sense of 
damp immurement that the floor of the glacier 
gave. The sun struck our tent at 4.30 a. m., 
which is nearly two and one-half hours earlier 
than we received his rays below, and lingered 
with us long after our glacier camp was in the 
shadow of the North Peak. Moreover, instead 
of being colder, as we expected, it was warmer, 
the minimum ranging around zero instead of 
around 10° below. 

The rapidity with which the weather changed 
up here was a continual source of surprise to us. 
At one moment the skies would be clear, the 
peaks and the ridge standing out with brilliant 
definition; literally five minutes later they would 
be all blotted out by dense volumes of vapor that 
poured over from the south. Perhaps ten minutes 

60 




Camp at 13,000 feet on Northeast Ridge. 



Clouds and Climate 

more and the cloud had swept down upon the 
glacier and all above would be clear again; or it 
might be the vapor deepened and thickened into 
a heavy snow-storm. Sometimes everything be- 
low was visible and nothing above, and a few 
minutes later everything below would be obscured 
and everything above revealed. 

This great crescent range is, indeed, our rampart 
against the hateful humidity of the coast and 
gives to us in the interior the dry, windless, ex- 
hilarating cold that is characteristic of our winters. 
We owe it mainly to this range that our snowfall 
averages about six feet instead of the thirty or 
forty feet that falls on the coast. The winds that 
sweep northward toward this mountain range are 
saturated with moisture from the warm waters of 
the Pacific Ocean; but contact with the lofty 
colds condenses the moisture into clouds and pre- 
cipitates most of it on the southern slopes as 
snow. Still bearing all the moisture their less- 
ened temperature will allow, the clouds pour 
through every notch and gap in the range and 
press resolutely onward and downward, stream- 
ing along the glaciers toward the interior. But 
all the time of their passage they are parting with 
their moisture, for the snow is falling from them 
continually in their course. They reach the in- 

6i 



The Ascent of Denali 

terior, indeed, and spread out triumphant over the 
lowlands, but most of their burden has been de- 
posited along the way. One is reminded of the 
government train of mules from Fort Egbert that 
used to supply the remote posts of the "strategic" 
telegraph line before strategy yielded to economy 
and the useless line was abandoned. When the 
train reached the Tanana Crossing it had eaten up 
nine-tenths of its original load, and only one-tenth 
remained for the provisioning of the post. So 
these clouds were being squeezed like a sponge; 
every saddle they pushed through squeezed them; 
every peak and ridge they surmounted squeezed 
them; every glacier floor they crept down squeezed 
them, and they reached the interior valleys at- 
tenuated, depleted, and relatively harmless. 

The aneroids had kept fairly well with the mer- 
curial barometer and the boiling-point thermom- 
eter until we moved to the ridge; from this time 
they displayed a progressive discrepancy therewith 
that put them out of serious consideration, and 
one was as bad as the other. Eleven thousand 
feet seemed the limit of their good behavior. To 
set them back day by day, like Captain Cuttle's 
watch, would be to depend wholly upon the other 
instruments anyway, and this is just what we did, 
not troubling to adjust them. They were read 

62 



Aneroids 

and recorded merely because that routine had 
been established. Says Burns: 

"There was a lad was born in Kyle, 
But whatna' day o' whatna' style, 
I doubt it's hardly worth the while 
To be sae nice wi' Robin." 

So they were just aneroids: aluminum cases, 
jewelled movements, army-officer patented im- 
provements, Kew certificates, import duty, and 
all — just aneroids, and one was as bad as the 
other. Within their limitations they are exceed- 
ingly useful instruments, but it is folly to depend 
on them for measuring great heights. 

Perched up here, the constant struggle of the 
clouds from the humid south to reach the interior 
was interesting to watch, and one readily under- 
stood that Denali and his lesser companions are 
a prime factor in the climate of interior Alaska. 

Day by day Karstens and Walter would go up 
and resume the finding and making of a way, and 
Tatum and the writer would relay the stuff from 
the camp to a cache, some five hundred feet above, 
and thence to another. The grand objective point 
toward which the advance party was working 
was the earthquake cleavage — a clean, sharp cut 
in the ice and snow of fifty feet in height. Above 
that point all was smooth, though fearfully steep; 

63 



The Ascent of Denali 

below was the confusion the earthquake had 
wrought. Each day Karstens felt sure they 
would reach the break, but each day as they ad- 
vanced toward it the distance lengthened and 
the intricate difficulties increased. More than 
once a passage painfully hewn in the soHd ice had 
to be abandoned, because it gave no safe exit, and 
some other passage found. At last the cleavage 
was reached, and it proved the most ticklish piece 
of the whole ridge to get around. Just below it 
was a loose snow slope at a dangerous angle, where 
it seemed only the initial impulse was needed for 
an avalanche to bear it all below. And just before 
crossing that snow slope was a wall of overhang- 
ing ice beneath which steps must be cut for one 
hundred yards, every yard of which endangered 
the climber by disputing the passage of the pack 
upon his shoulders. 

Late in the evening of the 27th May, looking 
up the ridge upon our return from relaying a load 
to the cache, we saw Karstens and Walter stand- 
ing, clear-cut, against the sky, upon the surface of 
the unbroken snow above the earthquake cleav- 
age. Tatum and I gave a great shout of joy, and, 
far above as they were, they heard us and waved 
their response. We watched them advance upon 
the steep slope of the ridge until the usual cloud 

64 



The Primus Stove 

descended and blotted them out. The way was 
clear to the top of the ridge now, and that night 
our spirits were high, and congratulations were 
showered upon the victorious pioneers. The next 
day, when they would have gone on to the pass, 
the weather drove them back. On that smooth, 
steep, exposed slope a wind too high for safety 
beat upon them, accompanied by driving snow. 
That day a little accident happened that threat- 
ened our whole enterprise — on such small threads 
do great undertakings hang. The primus stove 
is an admirable device for heating and cooking — 
superior, one thinks, to all the newfangled "alco- 
hol utilities" — but it has a weak point. The fine 
stream of kerosene — which, under pressure from 
the air-pump, is impinged against the perforated 
copper cup, heated to redness by burning alco- 
hol, and is thus vaporized — first passes through 
several convolutions of pipe within the burner, 
and then issues from a hole so fine that some 
people would not call it a hole at all but an orifice 
or something like that. That little hole is the 
weak spot of the primus stove. Sometimes it 
gets clogged, and then a fine wire mounted upon 
some sort of handle must be used to dislodge the 
obstruction. Now, the worst thing that can hap- 
pen to a primus stove is to get the wire pricker 

65 



The Ascent of Denali 

broken off in the burner hole, and that is what 
happened to us. Without a special tool that we 
did not possess, it is impossible to get at that 
burner to unscrew it, and without unscrewing it 
the broken wire cannot be removed. Tatum and 
I turned the stove upside down and beat upon it 
and tapped it, but nothing would dislodge that 
wire. It looked remarkably like no supper; it 
looked alarmingly like no more stove. How we 
wished we had brought the other stove from the 
launch, also! Every bow on an undertaking of 
this kind should have two strings. But when 
Karstens came back he went to work at once, and 
this was one of the many occasions when his re- 
sourcefulness was of the utmost service. With a 
file, and his usual ingenuity, he constructed, out of 
the spoon-bowl of a pipe cleaner the writer had in 
his pocket, the special tool necessary to grip that 
little burner, and soon the burner was unscrewed 
and the broken wire taken out and the primus 
was purring away merrily again, melting the water 
for supper. We feel sure that we would have 
pushed on even had we been without fire. The 
pemmican was cooked already, and could be eaten 
as it was, and one does not die of thirst in the 
midst of snow; but calm reflection will hardly 
allow that we could have reached the summit 

66 



Germless Air 

had we been deprived of all means of cooking and 
heating. 

On this ridge the dough refused to sour, and 
since our baking-powder was consumed in the 
fire we were henceforth without bread. A cold 
night killed the germ in the sour dough, and we 
were never again able to set up a fermentation in 
it. Doubtless the air at this altitude is free from 
the necessary spores or germs of ferment. Pas- 
teur's and Tyndall's experiments on the Alps, 
which resulted in the overthrow of the theory of 
spontaneous generation, and the rehabilitation of 
the old dogma that life comes only from Hfe, were 
recalled with interest, but without much satisfac- 
tion. We tried all sorts of ways of cooking the 
flour, but none with any success. Next to the loss 
of sugar we felt the loss of bread, and in the food 
longings that overtook us bread played a large part. 

On Friday, 30th May, the way had been pros- 
pected right up to the pass which gives entrance 
to the Grand Basin; a camping-place had been 
dug out there and a first load of stuff carried 
through and cached. So on that morning we 
broke camp, and the four of us, roped together, 
began the most important advance we had made 
yet. With stiff packs on our backs we toiled up 
the steps that had been cut with so much pains 

^1 



The Ascent of Denali 

and stopped at the cache just below the cleavage 
to add yet further burdens. All day nothing 
was visible beyond our immediate environment. 
Again and again one would have liked to photo- 
graph the sensational-looking traverse of some 
particularly difficult ice obstacle, but the mist 
enveloped everything. 

Just before we reached the smooth snow slope 
above the range of the earthquake disturbance lay 
one of the really dangerous passages of the climb. 

It is easier to describe the difficulty and danger 
of this particular portion of the ascent than to 
give a clear impression to a reader of other places 
almost as hazardous. Directly below the earth- 
quake cleavage was an enormous mass of ice, de- 
tached from the cleavage wall. From below, it 
had seemed connected with that wall, and much 
time and toil had been expended in cutting steps 
up it and along its crest, only to find a great gulf 
fixed; so it was necessary to pass along its base. 
Now from its base there fell away at an exceed- 
ingly sharp angle, scarcely exceeding the angle 
of repose, a slope of soft, loose snow, and the 
very top of that slope where it actually joined the 
wall of ice offered the only possible passage. The 
wall was in the main perpendicular, and turned 
at a right angle midway. Just where it turned, 

68 



A Perilous Passage 

a great mass bulged out and overhung. This 
traverse was so long that with both ropes joined 
it was still necessary for three of the four members 
of the party to be on the snow slope at once, two 
men out of sight of the others. Any one familiar 
with Alpine work will realize immediately the 
great danger of such a traverse. There was, how- 
ever, no avoiding it, or, at whatever cost, we should 
have done so. Twice already the passage had 
been made by Karstens and Walter, but not with 
heavy packs, and one man was always on ice 
while the other was on snow. This time all four 
must pass, bearing all that men could bear. 
Cautiously the first man ventured out, setting 
foot exactly where foot had been set before, the 
three others solidly anchored on the ice, paying 
out the rope and keeping it taut. When all the 
first section of rope was gone, the second man 
started, and when, in turn, his rope was paid out, 
the third man started, leaving the last man on the 
ice holding to the rope. This, of course, was the 
most dangerous part of this passage. If one of 
the three had slipped it would have been almost 
impossible for the others to hold him, and if he 
had pulled the others down, it would have been 
quite impossible for the solitary man on the ice 
to have withstood the strain. When the first 

69 



The Ascent of Denali 

man reached solid ice again there was another 
equally dangerous minute or two, for then all 
three behind him were on the snow slope. The 
beetling cliff, where the trail turned at right angles, 
was the acutely dangerous spot. With heavy and 
bulky packs it was exceedingly difficult to squeeze 
past this projection. Ice gives no such entrance 
to the point of the axe as hard snow does, yet the 
only aid in steadying the climber, and in somewhat 
relieving his weight on the loose snow, was afforded 
by such purchase upon the ice-wall, shoulder high, 
as that point could effect. Not a word was spoken 
b}^ any one; all along the ice-wall rang in the 
writer's ears that preposterous line from "The 
Hunting of the Snark" — "Silence, not even a 
shriek!" It was with a deep and thankful re- 
lief that we found ourselves safely across, and 
when a few minutes later we had climbed the 
steep snow that lay against the cleavage wall and 
were at last upon the smooth, unbroken crest of 
the ridge, we realized that probably the worst 
place in the entire climb was behind us. 

Steep to the very limit of climbability as that 
ridge was, it was the easiest going we had had 
since we left the glacier floor. The steps were 
already cut; it was only necessary to lift one foot 
after the other and set the toe well in the hole, 

70 



The Cock's Comb 

with the Ice-axe buried afresh in the snow above 
at every step. But each step meant the lifting 
not only of oneself but of one's load, and the in- 
creasing altitude, perhaps aggravated by the dense 
vapor with which the air was charged, made the 
advance exceedingly fatiguing. From below, the 
foreshortened ridge seemed only of short length 
and of moderate grade, could we but reach it — 
a tantalizingly easy passage to the upper glacier 
it looked as we chopped our way, little by little, 
nearer and nearer to it. But once upon It, it 
lengthened out endlessly, the sky-line always just 
a little above us, but never getting any closer. 

Just before reaching the steepest pitch of the 
ridge, where it sweeps up In a cock's comb,* we 
came upon the vestiges of a camp made by our 
predecessors of a year before, in a hollow dug in 
the snow — an empty biscuit carton and a raisin 
package, some trash and brown paper and dis- 
colored snow — as fresh as though they had been 
left yesterday instead of a year ago. Truly the 
terrific storms of this region are like the storms 
of Guy Wetmore Carryl's clever rhyme that "come 
early and avoid the rush'' They will sweep a 
man off his feet, as once threatened to our advance 
party, but will pass harmlessly over a cigarette 

*See illustration facing p. 40 
71 



The Ascent of Denali 

stump and a cardboard box; our tent in the 
glacier basin, ramparted by a wall of ice-blocks 
as high as itself, we found overwhelmed and pros- 
trate upon our return, but the willow shoots with 
which we had staked our trail upon the glacier 
were all standing. 

Long as it was, the slope was ended at last, and 
we came straight to the great upstanding granite 
slabs amongst which is the natural camping-place 
in the pass that gives access to the Grand Basin. 
We named that pass the Parker Pass, and the 
rock tower of the ridge that rises immediately 
above it, the most conspicuous feature of this re- 
gion from below, we named the Browne Tower. 
The Parker-Browne party was the first to camp at 
this spot, for the astonishing "sourdough" pioneers 
made no camp at all above the low saddle of the 
ridge (as it then existed), but took all the way to 
the summit of the North Peak in one gigantic 
stride. The names of Parker and Browne should 
surely be permanently associated with this moun- 
tain they were so nearly successful in climbing, 
and we found no better places to name for them. 

There is only one difficulty about the naming of 
this pass; strictly speaking, it is not a pass at all, 
and the writer does not know of any mountain- 
eering term that technically describes it. Yet it 

72 




The Upper Basin reached at last. Our camp at the Parker 
Pass at 15,000 feet. 



Karstens Ridge 

should bear a name, for it is the doorway to the 
upper glacier, through which all those who would 
reach the summit must enter. On the one hand 
rises the Browne Tower, with the Northeast Ridge 
sweeping away beyond it toward the South Peak. 
On the other hand, the ice of the upper glacier 
plunges to its fall. The upstanding blocks of 
granite on a little level shoulder of the ridge lead 
around to the base of the cliffs of the Northeast 
Ridge, and it is around the base of those cliffs that 
the way lies to the midst of the Grand Basin. So 
the Parker Pass we call it and desire that it should 
be named. 

And while names are before us, the writer would 
ask permission to bestow another. Having noth- 
ing to his credit in the matter at all, as the narra- 
tive has already indicated, he feels free to say 
that in his opinion the conquest of the difficulties 
of the earthquake-shattered ridge was an exploit 
that called for high qualities of judgment and cau- 
tious daring, and would, he thinks, be considered 
a brilliant piece of mountaineering anywhere in the 
world. He would like to name that ridge Kar- 
stens Ridge, in honor of the man who, with Wal- 
ter's help, cut that staircase three miles long amid 
the perilous complexities of its chaotic ice-blocks. 

When we reached the Parker Pass all the world 
73 



The Ascent of Denali 

beneath us was shrouded in dense mist, but all 
above us was bathed in bright sunshine. The 
great slabs of granite were like a gateway through 
which the Grand Basin opened to our view. 

The ice of the upper glacier, which fills the 
Grand Basin, came terracing down from some four 
thousand feet above us and six miles beyond us, 
with progressive leaps of jagged blue serac between 
the two peaks of the mountain, and, almost at our 
feet, fell away with cataract curve to its precipi- 
tation four thousand feet below us. Across the 
glacier were the sheer, dark cliffs of the North 
Peak, soaring to an almost immediate summit 
twenty thousand feet above the sea; on the left, 
in the distance, was just visible the receding 
snow dome of the South Peak, with its two horns 
some five hundred feet higher. The mists were 
passing from the distant summits, curtain after 
curtain of gauze draping their heads for a mo- 
ment and sweeping on. 

We made our camp between the granite slabs 
on the natural camping site that offered itself, 
and a shovel and an empty alcohol-can proclaimed 
that our predecessors of last year had done the 
same. 

The next morning the weather had almost com- 
pletely cleared, and the view below us burst upon 

74 



Parker Pass 

our eyes as we came out of the tent into the still 
air. 

The Parker Pass is the most splendid coigne of 
vantage on the whole mountain, except the sum- 
mit itself. From an elevation of something more 
than fifteen thousand feet one overlooks the whole 
Alaskan range, and the scope of view to the east, 
to the northeast, and to the southeast is uninter- 
rupted. Mountain range rises beyond mountain 
range, until only the snowy summits are visible in 
the great distance, and one knows that beyond 
the last of them lies the open sea. The near-by 
peaks and ridges, red with granite or black with 
shale and gullied from top to bottom with snow 
and ice, the broad highways of the glaciers at their 
feet carrying parallel moraines that look like giant 
tram-Hnes, stand out with vivid distinction. A 
lofty peak, that we suppose is Mount Hunter, 
towers above the lesser summits. The two arms 
of the Muldrow Glacier start right in the fore- 
ground and reveal themselves from their heads to 
their junction and then to the terminal snout, 
receiving their groaning tributaries from every 
evacuating height. The dim blue lowlands, now 
devoid of snow, stretch away to the northeast, 
with threads of stream and patches of lake that 
still carry ice along their banks. 

75 



The Ascent of Denali 

And all this splendor and diversity yielded itself 
up to us at once; that was the most sensational 
and spectacular feature of it. We went to sleep 
in a smother of mist; we had seen nothing as we 
climbed; we rose to a clear, sparkling day. The 
clouds were mysteriously rolling away from the 
lowest depths; the last wisps of vapor were sweep- 
ing over the ultimate heights. Here one would 
like to camp through a whole week of fine weather 
could such a week ever be counted upon. Higher 
than any point in the United States, the top of 
the Browne Tower probably on a level with the 
top of Mount Blanc, it is yet not so high as to 
induce the acute breathlessness from which the 
writer suffered, later, upon any exertion. The 
climbing of the tower, the traversing to the other 
side of it, the climbing of the ridge, would afford 
pleasant excursions, while the opportunity for 
careful though difficult photography would be 
unrivalled. Even in thick weather the clouds are 
mostly below; and their rapid movement, the 
kaleidoscopic changes which their coming and 
going, their thickening and thinning, their rising 
and falling produce, are a never-failing source of 
interest and pleasure. The changes of light and 
shade, the gradations of color, were sometimes 
wonderfully delicate and charming. Seen through 

1^ 




Q 



> 
o 

< 



The Himalayas 

rapidly attenuating mist, the bold crags of the icy 
ridge between the glacier arms in the foreground 
would give a soft French gray that became a 
luminous mauve before it sprang into dazzling 
black and white in the sunshine. In the sunshine, 
indeed, the whole landscape was hard and brilliant, 
and lacked half-tones, as in the main it lacked 
color; but when the vapor drew the gauze of its 
veil over it there came rich, soft, elusive tints that 
were no more than hinted ere they were gone. 

Here, with nothing but rock and ice and snow 
around, nine thousand feet above any sort of 
vegetation even in the summer, it was of interest 
to remember that at the same altitude in the 
Himalayas good crops of barley and millet are 
raised and apples are grown, while at a thousand 
feet or so lower the apricot is ripened on the 
terrace-gardens. 

Karstens and Walter had brought up a load 
each on their reconnoissance trip; four heavy loads 
had been brought the day before. There were yet 
two loads to be carried up from the cache below 
the cleavage, and Tatum and Walter, always ready 
to take the brunt of it, volunteered to bring them. 
So down that dreadful ridge once more the boys 
went, while Karstens and the writer prospected 
ahead for a route into the Grand Basin. 

n 



The Ascent of Denali 

The storms and snows of ten or a dozen winters 
may make a "steep but practicable snow slope" 
of the Northeast Ridge again. One winter only 
had passed since the convulsion that disrupted it, 
and already the snow was beginning to build up 
its gaps and chasms. All the summer through, 
for many hours on clear days, the sun will melt 
those snows and the frost at night will glaze them 
into ice. The more conformable ice-blocks will 
gradually be cemented together, while the fierce 
winds that beat upon the ridge will wear away 
the supports of the more egregious and unstable 
blocks, and one by one they will topple into the 
abyss on this side or on that. It will probably 
never again be the smooth, homogeneous slope it 
has been; "the gable" will probably always pre- 
sent a wide cleft, but the slopes beyond it, stripped 
now of their accumulated ice so as to be unclimb- 
able, may build up again and give access to the 
ridge. 

The point about one thousand five hundred feet 
above the gable, where the earthquake cleavage 
took place, will perhaps remain the crux of the 
climb. The ice-wall rises forty or fifty feet sheer, 
and the broken masses below it are especially 
difficult and precipitous, but with care and time 
and pains it can be surmounted even as we sur- 

78 



The Denali Problem 

mounted it. And wind and sun and storm may- 
mollify the forbidding abruptness of even this 
break in the course of time. 

With the exception of this ridge, Denali is not 
a mountain that presents special mountaineering 
difficulties of a technical kind. Its difficulties lie 
in its remoteness, its size, the great distances 
of snow and ice its cHmbing must include the 
passage of, the burdens that must be carried 
over those distances. We estimated that it was 
twenty miles of actual linear distance from the 
pass by which we reached the Muldrow Glacier 
to the summit. In the height of summer its snow- 
Hne will not be higher than seven thousand feet, 
while at the best season for climbing it, the spring, 
the snow-line is much lower. Its climbing is, like 
nearly all Alaskan problems, essentially one of 
transportation. But the Northeast Ridge, in its 
present condition, adds all the spice of sensation 
and danger that any man could desire. 



79 



CHAPTER IV 
THE GRAND BASIN 

THE reader will perhaps be able to sympa- 
thize with the feeling of elation and confi- 
dence which came to us when we had surmounted 
the difficulties of the ridge and had arrived at the 
entrance to the Grand Basin. We realized that 
the greater and more arduous part of our task 
was done and that the way now lay open before 
us. For so long a time this point had been the 
actual goal of our efforts, for so long a time we 
had gazed upward at it with hope deferred, that 
its final attainment was accompanied with no 
small sense of triumph and gratification and with 
a great accession of faith that we should reach 
the top of the mountain. 

The ice of the glacier that fills the basin was 
hundreds of feet beneath us at the pass, but it 
rises so rapidly that by a short traverse under the 
cliffs of the ridge we were able to reach its sur- 
face and select a camping site thereon at about 
sixteen thousand feet. It was bitterly cold, with 

80 



Heat and Cold 

a keen wind that descended in gusts from the 
heights, and the slow movement of step-cutting 
gave the man in the rear no opportunity of warm- 
ing up. Toes and fingers grew numb despite mul- 
tiple socks within mammoth moccasins and thick 
gloves within fur mittens. 

From this time, during our stay in the Grand 
Basin and until we had left it and descended again, 
the weather progressively cleared and brightened 
until all clouds were dispersed. From time to 
time there were fresh descents of vapor, and even 
short snow-storms, but there was no general en- 
veloping of the mountain again. Cold it was, at 
times even in the sunshine, with "a nipping and 
an eager air," but when the wind ceased it would 
grow intensely hot. On the 4th June, at 3 P. m., 
the thermometer in the full sunshine rose to 
50° F. — the highest temperature recorded on the 
whole excursion — and the fatigue of packing in 
that thin atmosphere with the sun's rays reflected 
from ice and snow everywhere was most exhaust- 
ing. We were burned as brown as Indians; lips 
and noses split and peeled in spite of continual 
applications of lanoline, but, thanks to those most 
beneficent amber snow-glasses, no one of the party 
had the slightest trouble with his eyes. At night 
it was always cold, 10° below zero being the high- 

81 



The Ascent of Denali 

est minimum during our stay in the Grand Basin, 
and 21° below zero the lowest. But we always 
slept warm; with sheep-skins and caribou-skins 
under us, and down quilts and camel's-hair blan- 
kets and a wolf-robe for bedding, the four of us lay 
in that six-by-seven tent, in one bed, snug and 
comfortable. It was disgraceful overcrowding, 
but it was warm. The fierce little primus stove, 
pumped up to its limit and perfectly consuming its 
kerosene fuel, shot out its corona of beautiful blue 
flame and warmed the tight, tiny tent. The pri- 
mus stove, burning seven hours on a quart of coal- 
oil, is a little giant for heat generation. If we 
had had two, so that one could have served for 
cooking and one for heating, we should not have 
suffered from the cold at all, but as it was, when- 
ever the stew-pot went on the stove, or a pot full 
of ice to melt, the heat was immediately absorbed 
by the vessel and not distributed through the tent. 
But another primus stove would have been an- 
other five or six pounds to pack, and we were 
"heavy" all the time as it was. 

Something has already been said about the 
fatigue of packing, and one would not weary the 
reader with continual reference thereto; yet it 
is certain that those who have carried a pack only 
on the lower levels cannot conceive how enor- 

82 




CQ 



13 

C 



O 







Wr 



o 



h: 



^3 
C 



H 



The Labor of Packing 

mously greater the labor is at these heights. As 
one rises and the density of the air is diminished, 
so, it would seem, the weight of the pack or the 
effect of the weight of the pack is in the same 
ratio increased. We probably moved from three 
hundred to two hundred and fifty pounds, decreas- 
ing somewhat as food and fuel were consumed, 
each time camp was advanced in the Grand Basin. 
We could have done with a good deal less as it fell 
out, but this we did not know, and we were re- 
solved not to be defeated in our purpose by lack 
of supplies. But the packing of these loads, re- 
laying them forward, and all the time steeply 
rising, was labor of the most exhausting and fatigu- 
ing kind, and there is no possible way in which it 
may be avoided in the ascent of this mountain. 
To roam over glaciers and scramble up peaks free 
and untrammelled is mountaineering in the Alps. 
Put a forty-pound pack on a man's back, with the 
knowledge that to-morrow he must go down for 
another, and you have mountaineering in Alaska. 
In the ascent of this twenty-thousand-foot moun- 
tain every member of the party climbed at least 
sixty thousand feet. It is this going down and 
doing it all over again that is the heart-breaking 
part of climbing. 
It was in the Grand Basin that the writer began 
83 



The Ascent of Denali 

to be seriously affected by the altitude, to be dis- 
turbed by a shortness of breath that with each 
advance grew more distressingly acute. While 
at rest he was not troubled; mere existence im- 
posed no unusual burden, but even a slight exer- 
tion would be followed by a spell of panting, and 
climbing with a pack was interrupted at every 
dozen or score of steps by the necessity of stopping 
to regain breath. There was no nausea or head- 
ache or any other symptom of "mountain sick- 
ness." Indeed, it is hard for us to understand that 
affection as many climbers describe it. It has been 
said again and again to resemble seasickness in 
all its symptoms. Now the writer is of the un- 
fortunate company that are seasick on the slight- 
est provocation. Even rough water on the wide 
stretches of the lower Yukon, when a wind is 
blowing upstream and the launch is pitching 
and tossing, will give him qualms. But no one 
of the four of us had any such feeling on the 
mountain at any time. Shortness of breath we 
all suffered from, though none other so acutely 
as myself. When it was evident that the progress 
of the party was hindered by the constant stops 
on my account, the contents of my pack were dis- 
tributed amongst the others and my load reduced 
to the mercurial barometer and the instruments, 

84 




o 
o 



CQ 



^3 

C 



a 



Tobacco 

and, later, to the mercurial barometer alone. It 
was some mortification not to be able to do one's 
share of the packing, but there was no help for 
it, and the other shoulders were young and strong 
and kindly. 

With some hope of improving his wind, the 
writer had reduced his smoking to two pipes a 
day so soon as the head of the glacier had been 
reached, and had abandoned tobacco altogether 
when camp was first made on the ridge; but it is 
questionable if smoking in moderation has much 
or any effect. Karstens, who smoked continually, 
and Walter, who had never smoked in his life, 
had the best wind of the party. It is probably 
much more a matter of age. Karstens was a 
man of thirty-two years, and the two boys were 
just twenty-one, while the writer approached fifty. 
None of us slept as well as usual except Walter — 
and nothing ever interferes with his sleep — but, 
although our slumbers were short and broken, 
they seemed to bring recuperation just as though 
they had been sound. We arose fresh in the 
morning though we had slept little and light. 

On the 30th May we had made our camp at 
the Parker Pass; on the 2d June, the finest and 
brightest day in three weeks, we moved to our 
first camp in the Grand Basin. On the 3d June 

85 



The Ascent of Denali 

we moved camp again, out into the middle of the 
glacier, at about sixteen thousand five hundred 
feet. 

Here we were at the upper end of one of the 
flats of the glacier that fills the Grand Basin, the 
serac of another great rise just above us. The 
walls of the North Peak grow still more striking 
and picturesque here, where they attain their 
highest elevation. These granite ramparts, falling 
three thousand feet sheer, swell out into belly- 
ing buttresses with snow slopes between them as 
they descend to the glacier floor, while on top, 
above the granite, each peak point and crest 
ridge is tipped with black shale. How comes that 
ugly black shale, with the fragments of which all 
the lower glacier is strewn, to have such lofty 
eminence and granite-guarded distinction, as 
though it were the most beautiful or the most 
valuable thing in the world ? The McKinley Fork 
of the Kantishna, which drains the Muldrow, is 
black as ink with it, and its presence can be de- 
tected in the Tanana River itself as far as its 
junction with the Yukon. It is largely soluble 
in water, and where melting snow drips over it 
on the glacier walls below were great splotches, 
for all the world as though a gigantic ink-pot had 
been upset. 

86 



The Flagstaff 

While we sat resting awhile on our way to this 
camp, gazing at these pinnacles of the North 
Peak, we fell to talking about the pioneer climbers 
of this mountain who claimed to have set a flag- 
staff near the summit of the North Peak — as to 
which feat a great deal of incredulity existed in 
Alaska for several reasons — and we renewed our 
determination that, if the weather permitted when 
we had reached our goal and ascended the South 
Peak, we would climb the North Peak also to seek 
for traces of this earliest exploit on Denali, which 
is dealt with at length in another place in this 
book. All at once Walter cried out: "I see the 
flagstaff!" Eagerly pointing to the rocky prom- 
inence nearest the summit — the summit itself is 
covered with snow — he added: "I see it plainly!" 
Karstens, looking where he pointed, saw it also, 
and, whipping out the field-glasses, one by one 
we all looked, and saw it distinctly standing out 
against the sky. With the naked eye I was never 
able to see it unmistakably, but through the glasses 
it stood out, sturdy and strong, one side covered 
with crusted snow. We were greatly rejoiced that 
we could carry down positive confirmation of this 
matter. It was no longer necessary for us to 
ascend the North Peak. 

The upper glacier also bore plain signs of the 
87 



The Ascent of Denali 

earthquake that had shattered the ridge. Huge 
blocks of ice were strewn upon it, ripped off the 
left-hand wall, but it was nowhere crevassed as 
badly as the lower glacier, but much more broken 
up into serac. Some of the bergs presented very 
beautiful sights, wind-carved incrustations of 
snow in cameo upon their blue surface giving a 
suggestion of Wedgwood pottery. All tints seemed 
more delicate and beautiful up here than on the 
lower glacier. 

On the 5th June we advanced to about seventeen 
thousand five hundred feet right up the middle 
of the glacier. As we rose that morning slowly 
out of the flat in which our tent was pitched and 
began to climb the steep serac, clouds that had 
been gathering below swept rapidly up into the 
Grand Basin, and others swept as rapidly over the 
summits and down upon us. In a few moments 
we were in a dense smother of vapor with nothing 
visible a couple of hundred yards away. Then 
the temperature dropped, and soon snow was fall- 
ing which increased to a heavy snow-storm that 
raged an hour. We made our camp and ate our 
lunch, and by that time the smother of vapor 
passed, the sun came out hot again, and we were 
all simultaneously overtaken with a deep drowsi- 
ness and slept. Then out into the glare again, to 

88 






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Last Camp 

go down and bring up the remainder of the stuff, 
we went, and that night we were established in 
our last camp but one. We had decided to go 
up at least five hundred feet farther that we 
might have the less to climb when we made our 
final attack upon the peak. So when we returned 
with the loads from below we did not stop at 
camp, but carried them forward and cached them 
against to-morrow's final move. 

On Friday, the 6th June, we made our last move 
and pitched our tent in a flat near the base of the 
ridge, just below the final rise in the glacier of the 
Grand Basin, at about eighteen thousand feet, 
and we were able to congratulate one another on 
making the highest camp ever made in North 
America. I set up and read the mercurial barom- 
eter, and when corrected for its own temperature 
it stood at 15.061. The boiling-point thermom- 
eter registered 180.5, ^s the point at which water 
boiled, with an air temperature of 35°. It toojc 
one hour to boil the rice for supper. The aneroids 
stood at 14.8 and 14.9, still steadily losing on the 
mercurial barometer. I think that a rough alti- 
tude gauge could be calculated from the time rice 
takes to boil — at least as reliable as an aneroid 
barometer. At the Parker Pass it took fifty 
minutes; here it took sixty. This is about the 

89 



The Ascent of Denali 

height of perpetual snow on the great Himalayan 
peaks; but we had been above the perpetual 
snow-line for forty-eight days. 

We were now within about two thousand five 
hundred feet of the summit and had two weeks' 
full supply of food and fuel, which, at a pinch, 
could be stretched to three weeks. Certain things 
were short: the chocolate and figs and raisins and 
salt were low; of the zwieback there remained but 
two and one-half packages, reserved against lunch 
when we attacked the summit. But the meat- 
balls, the erbswurst, the caribou jelly, the rice, 
and the tea — our staples — were abundant for two 
weeks, with four gallons of coal-oil and a gallon of 
alcohol. The end of our painful transportation 
hither was accompHshed; we were within one day's 
climb of the summit with supplies to besiege. If 
the weather should prove persistently bad we 
could wait; we could advance our parallels; could 
put another camp on the ridge itself at nineteen 
thousand feet, and yet another half-way up the 
dome. If we had to fight our way step by step 
and could advance but a couple of hundred feet 
a day, we were still confident that, barring un- 
foreseeable misfortunes, we could reach the top. 
But we wanted a clear day on top, that the ob- 
servations we designed to make could be made; it 

90 




^!ta 



-«. 



The North Peak, 20,000 feet high. 

Our last camp in the Grand Basin, at 18,000 feet: the highest camp ever made in 
North America. 



Brcathlcssncss 

would be a poor success that did but set our feet 
on the highest point. And we felt sure that, pre- 
pared as we were to wait, the clear day would 
come. 

As so often happens when everything unpro- 
pitious is guarded against, nothing unpropitious 
occurs. It would have been a wonderful chance, 
indeed, if, supplied only for one day, a fine, clear 
day had come. But supplied against bad weather 
for two or three weeks, it was no wonder at all 
that the very first day should have presented itself 
bright and clear. We had exhausted our bad 
fortune below; here, at the juncture above all 
others at which we should have chosen to enjoy 
it, we were to encounter our good fortune. 

But here, where all signs seemed to promise 
success to the expedition, the author began to 
have fears of personal failure. The story of Mr. 
Fitzgerald's expedition to Aconcagua came to his 
mind, and he recalled that, although every other 
member of the party reached the summit, that 
gentleman himself was unable to do so. In the 
last stage the difficulty of breathing had increased 
with fits of smothering, and the medicine chest 
held no remedy for blind staggers. 



91 



CHAPTER V 
THE ULTIMATE HEIGHT 

WE lay down for a few hours on the night 
of the 6th June, resolved to rise at three 
in the morning for our attempt upon the summit 
of DenaH. At supper Walter had made a des- 
perate effort to use some of our ten pounds of flour 
in the manufacture of "noodles" with which to 
thicken the stew. We had continued to pack that 
flour and had made eff"ort after eff'ort to cook it 
in some eatable way, but without success. The 
sour dough would not ferment, and we had no 
baking-powder. Is there any way to cook flour 
under such circumstances.^ But he made the 
noodles too large and did not cook them enough, 
and they wrought internal havoc upon those who 
partook of them. Three of the four of us were 
unwell all night. The digestion is certainly more 
delicate and more easily disturbed at great alti- 
tudes than at the lower levels. While Karstens 
and Tatum were tossing uneasily in the bed- 
clothes, the writer sat up with a blanket round his 

92 



Start to the Summit 

shoulders, crouching over the primus stove, with 
the thermometer at— 21° F. outdoors. Walter 
alone was at ease, with digestive and somnolent 
capabilities proof against any Invasion. It was, 
of course, broad daylight all night. At three the 
company was aroused, and, after partaking of a 
very light breakfast indeed, we sallied forth into 
the brilliant, clear morning with not a cloud in 
the sky. The only packs we carried that day 
were the instruments and the lunch. The sun 
was shining, but a keen north wind was blowing 
and the thermometer stood at — 4° F. We were 
rather a sorry company. Karstens still had in- 
ternal pains; Tatum and I had severe headaches. 
Walter was the only one feeling entirely himself, 
so Walter was put in the lead and in the lead he 
remained all day. 

We took a straight course up the great snow 
ridge directly south of our camp and then around 
the peak Into which It rises; quickly told but 
slowly and most laboriously done. It was nec- 
essary to make the traverse high up on this peak 
instead of around Its base, so much had Its Ice 
and snow been shattered by the earthquake on 
the lower portions. Once around this peak, there 
rose before us the horseshoe ridge which carries 
the ultimate height of Denah, a horseshoe ridge 

93 



The Ascent of Denali 

of snow opening to the east with a low snow peak 
at either end, the centre of the ridge soaring above 
both peaks. Above us was nothing visible but 
snow; the rocks were all beneath, the last rocks 
standing at about 19,000 feet. Our progress was 
exceedingly slow. It was bitterly cold; all the 
morning toes and fingers were without sensation, 
kick them and beat them as we would. We were 
all clad in full winter hand and foot gear — more 
gear than had sufficed at 50° below zero on the 
Yukon trail. Within the writer's No. i6 moc- 
casins were three pairs of heavy hand-knitted 
woollen socks, two pairs of camel's-hair socks, and 
a pair of thick felt socks; while underneath them, 
between them and the iron "creepers," were the 
soles cut from a pair of felt shoes. Upon his 
hands were a pair of the thickest Scotch wool 
gloves, thrust inside huge lynx-paw mitts lined 
with Hudson Bay duffle. His moose-hide breeches 
and shirt, worn all the winter on the trail, were 
worn throughout this cHmb; over the shirt was 
a thick sweater and over all the usual Alaskan 
**parkee" amply furred around the hood; un- 
derneath was a suit of the heaviest Jaeger under- 
wear — yet until nigh noon feet were like lumps 
of iron and fingers were constantly numb. That 
north wind was cruelly cold, and there can be 

94 




The South Peak from about 18,000 feet. 

The ridge with two pealis in the background is shaped like a horseshoe, and the highest 

point on the mountain is on another little ridge just beyond, parallel with the 

ridge that shows, almost at the middle point between the two peaks. 



Cold 

no possible question that cold is felt much more 
keenly in the thin air of nineteen thousand feet 
than it is below. But the north wind was really 
our friend, for nothing but a north wind will drive 
all vapor from this mountain. Karstens beat his 
feet so violently and so continually against the 
hard snow to restore the circulation that two of 
his toe-nails sloughed off afterward. By eleven 
o'clock we had been climbing for six hours and 
were well around the peak, advancing toward the 
horseshoe ridge, but even then there were grave 
doubts if we should succeed in reaching it that 
day, it was so cold. A hint from any member of the 
party that his feet were actually freezing — a hint 
expected all along — would have sent us all back. 
When there is no sensation left in the feet at all 
it IS, however, difficult to be quite sure if they be 
actually freezing or not — and each one was willing 
to give the attempt upon the summit the benefit 
of the doubt. What should we have done with 
the ordinary leather climbing boots? But once 
entirely around the peak we were in a measure 
sheltered from the north wind, and the sun full 
upon us gave more warmth. It was hereabouts, 
and not, surely, at the point indicated in the 
photograph in Mr. Belmore Browne's book, that 
the climbing party of last year was driven back 

95 



The Ascent of Denali 

by the blizzard that descended upon them when 
close to their goal. Not until we had stopped 
for lunch and had drunk the scalding tea from 
the thermos bottles, did we all begin to have 
confidence that this day would see the comple- 
tion of the ascent. But the writer's shortness of 
breath became more and more distressing as he 
rose. The familiar fits of panting took a more 
acute form; at such times everything would turn 
black before his eyes and he would choke and 
gasp and seem unable to get breath at all. Yet 
a few moments' rest restored him completely, to 
struggle on another twenty or thirty paces and 
to sink gasping upon the snow again. All were 
more affected in the breathing than they had 
been at any time before — it was curious to see 
every man's mouth open for breathing — but none 
of the others in this distressing way. Before the 
traverse around the peak just mentioned, Walter 
had noticed the writer's growing discomfort and 
had insisted upon assuming the mercurial barom- 
eter. The boy's eager kindness was gladly ac- 
cepted and the instrument was surrendered. So 
it did not fall to the writer's credit to carry the 
thing to the top as he had wished. 

The climbing grew steeper and steeper; the 
slope that had looked easy from below now seemed 

96 



Climbing-irons 

to shoot straight up. For the most part the 
cHmbing-irons gave us sufficient footing, but here 
and there we came to softer snow, where they 
would not take sufficient hold and we had to 
cut steps. The calks in these climbing-irons were 
about an inch and a quarter long; we wished they 
had been two inches. The creepers are a great 
advantage in the matter of speed, but they need 
long points. They are not so safe as step-cutting, 
and there is the ever-present danger that unless 
one is exceedingly careful one will step upon the 
rope with them and their sharp calks sever some 
of the strands. They were, however, of great 
assistance and saved a deal of laborious step- 
cutting. 

At last the crest of the ridge was reached and 
we stood well above the two peaks that mark the 
ends of the horseshoe.* 

Also it was evident that we were well above 
the great North Peak across the Grand Basin. 

*The dotted line on the photograph opposite page 346 of Mr. 
Belmore Browne's book, "The Conquest of Mt. McKinley," does not, 
in the writer's opinion, represent the real course taken by Professor 
Parker, Mr. Belmore Browne, and Merl Le Voy in their approach 
to the summit, and it is easy to understand the confusion of direc- 
tion in the fierce storm that descended upon the party. If, as the 
dots show, the party went to the summit of the right-hand peak, 
they went out of their way and had still a considerable distance to 
travel. "Perhaps five minutes of easy walking would have taken 
us to the highest point," says Mr. Browne. It is probably more than 

97 



The Ascent of Denali 

Its crest had been like an index on the snow be- 
side us as we climbed, and we stopped for a few 
moments when it seemed that we were level with 
it. We judged it to be about five hundred feet 
lower than the South Peak. 

But still there stretched ahead of us, and per- 
haps one hundred feet above us, another small 
ridge with a north and south pair of little hay- 
cock summits. This is the real top of Denali. 
From below, this ultimate ridge merges indistin- 
guishably with the crest of the horseshoe ridge, 
but it is not a part of it but a culminating ridge 
beyond it. With keen excitement we pushed on. 
Walter, who had been in the lead all day, was the 
first to scramble up; a native Alaskan, he is the 
first human being to set foot upon the top of 
Alaska's great mountain, and he had well earned 
the lifelong distinction. Karstens and Tatum 
were hard upon his heels, but the last man on the 

a mile from the summit of the snow peak shown in the picture to the 
actual summit of the mountain. One who took that course would 
have to descend from the peak and then ascend the horseshoe ridge, 
and the highest point of the horseshoe ridge is perhaps two hundred 
feet above the summit of this snow peak. In the opinion that 
Professor Parker expressed to the writer, the dotted lines should 
bear much more to the left, making directly for the centre of the 
horseshoe ridge, which is the obvious course. But it should again 
be said that men in the circumstances and condition of this party 
when forced to turn back, may be pardoned for mistaking the exact 
direction in which they had been proceeding. 

98 




The climbing-irons. 



The Instrument Readings 

rope, in his enthusiasm and excitement somewhat 
overpassing his narrow wind margin, had almost 
to be hauled up the last few feet, and fell uncon- 
scious for a moment upon the floor of the little 
snow basin that occupies the top of the moun- 
tain. This, then, is the actual summit, a little 
crater-like snow basin, sixty or sixty-five feet long 
and twenty to twenty-five feet wide, with a hay- 
cock of snow at either end — the south one a little 
higher than the north. On the southwest this 
little basin is much corniced, and the whole thing 
looked as though every severe storm might some- 
what change its shape. 

So soon as wind was recovered we shook hands 
all round and a brief prayer of thanksgiving to 
Almighty God was said, that He had granted us 
our hearts' desire and brought us safely to the top 
of His great mountain. 

This prime duty done, we fell at once to our 
scientific tasks. The instrument-tent was set up, 
the mercurial barometer, taken out of its leather 
case and then out of its wooden case, was swung 
upon its tripod and a rough zero established, and 
it was left awhile to adjust itself to conditions 
before a reading was attempted. It was a great 
gratification to get it to the top uninjured. The 
boiling-point apparatus was put together and its 

99 



The Ascent of Denali 

candle lighted under the ice which filled its little 
cistern. The three-inch, three-circle aneroid was 
read at once at thirteen and two-tenths inches, 
its mendacious altitude scale confidently pointing 
at twenty-three thousand three hundred feet. 
Half an hour later it had dropped to 13.175 inches 
and had shot us up another one hundred feet into 
the air. Soon the water was boiling in the little 
tubes of the boiling-point thermometer and the 
steam pouring out of the vent. The thread of 
mercury rose to 174.9° and stayed there. There 
is something definite and uncompromising about 
the boiling-point hypsometer; no tapping will 
make it rise or fall; it reaches its mark unmis- 
takably and does not budge. The reading of 
the mercurial barometer is a slower and more 
delicate business. It takes a good light and a 
good sight to tell when the ivory zero-point is 
exactly touching the surface of the mercury in 
the cistern; it takes care and precision to get 
the vernier exactly level with the top of the col- 
umn. It was read, some half-hour after it was 
set up, at 13.617 inches. The alcohol minimum 
thermometer stood at 7° F. all the while we were 
on top. Meanwhile, Tatum had been reading a 
round of angles with the prismatic compass. He 
could not handle it with sufficient exactness with 

100 



The View 

his mitts on, and he froze his fingers doing it bare- 
handed. 

The scientific work accompHshed, then and not 
till then did we indulge ourselves in the wonder- 
ful prospect that stretched around us. It was a 
perfectly clear day, the sun shining brightly in 
the sky, and naught bounded our view save the 
natural limitations of vision. Immediately before 
us, in the direction in which we had climbed, lay 
— nothing: a void, a sheer gulf many thousands 
of feet deep, and one shrank back instinctively 
from the little parapet of the snow basin when 
one had glanced at the awful profundity. Across 
the gulf, about three thousand feet beneath us 
and fifteen or twenty miles away, sprang most 
splendidly into view the great mass of Denali's 
Wife, or Mount Foraker, as some white men mis- 
name her, filling majestically all the middle dis- 
tance. It was our first glimpse of her during the 
whole ascent. Denali's Wife does not appear at 
all save from the actual summit of Denali, for 
she is completely hidden by his South Peak until 
the moment when his South Peak is surmounted. 
And never was nobler sight displayed to man than 
that great, isolated mountain spread out com- 
pletely, with all its spurs and ridges, its cliffs and 
its glaciers, lofty and mighty and yet far beneath 

lOI 



The Ascent of Denali 

us. On that spot one understood why the view 
of Denali from Lake Minchumina is the grand 
view, for the west face drops abruptly down with 
nothing but that vast void from the top to nigh 
the bottom of the mountain. Beyond stretched, 
blue and vague to the southwest, the wide valley 
of the Kuskokwim, with an end of all mountains. 
To the north we looked right over the North Peak 
to the foot-hills below, patched with lakes and 
lingering snow, glittering with streams. We had 
hoped to see the junction of the Yukon and 
Tanana Rivers, one hundred and fifty miles away 
to the northwest, as we had often and often seen 
the summit of Denali from that point in the 
winter, but the haze that almost always qualifies 
a fine summer day inhibited that stretch of vision. 
Perhaps the forest-fires we found raging on the 
Tanana River were already beginning to foul the 
northern sky. 

It was, however, to the south and the east that 
the most marvellous prospect opened before us. 
What infinite tangle of mountain ranges filled the 
whole scene, until gray sky, gray mountain, and 
gray sea merged in the ultimate distance! The 
near-by peaks and ridges stood out with dazzling 
distinction, the glaciation, the drainage, the rela- 
tion of each part to the others all revealed. The 

102 







5i 



The Dark Sky 

snow-covered tops of the remoter peaks, dwin- 
dling and fading, rose to our view as though float- 
ing in thin air when their bases were hidden by 
the haze, and the beautiful crescent curve of the 
whole Alaskan range exhibited itself from Denali 
to the sea. To the right hand the glittering, tiny 
threads of streams draining the mountain range 
into the Chuhtna and Sushitna Rivers, and so to 
Cook's Inlet and the Pacific Ocean, spread them- 
selves out; to the left the affluents of the Kan- 
tishna and the Nenana drained the range into 
the Yukon and Bering Sea. 

Yet the chief impression was not of our connec- 
tion with the earth so far below, its rivers and 
its seas, but rather of detachment from it. We 
seemed alone upon a dead world, as dead as the 
mountains on the moon. Only once before can 
the writer remember a similar feeling of being 
neither in the world or of the world, and that was 
at the bottom of the Grand Canon of the Colo- 
rado, in Arizona, its savage granite walls as dead 
as this savage peak of ice. 

Above us the sky took a blue so deep that none 
of us had ever gazed upon a midday sky like it 
before. It was a deep, rich, lustrous, transparent 
blue, as dark as a Prussian blue, but intensely 
blue; a hue so strange, so increasingly impressive, 

103 



The Ascent of Denali 

that to one at least it "seemed like special news 
of God," as a new poet sings. We first noticed 
the darkening tint of the upper sky in the Grand 
Basin, and it deepened as we rose, Tyndall ob- 
served and discussed this phenomenon in the Alps, 
but it seems scarcely to have been mentioned 
since. 

It is difficult to describe at all the scene which 
the top of the mountain presented, and impossible 
to describe it adequately. One was not occupied 
with the thought of description but wholly pos- 
sessed with the breadth and glory of it, with its 
sheer, amazing immensity and scope. Only 
once, perhaps, in any Hfetime is such vision 
granted, certainly never before had been vouch- 
safed to any of us. Not often in the summer- 
time does Denali completely unveil himself and 
dismiss the clouds from all the earth beneath. 
Yet we could not linger, unique though the occa- 
sion, dearly bought our privilege; the miserable 
limitations of the flesh gave us continual warning 
to depart; we grew colder and still more wretch- 
edly cold. The thermometer stood at 7° in the 
full sunshine, and the north wind was keener than 
ever. My fingers were so cold that I would not 
venture to withdraw them from the mittens to 
change the film in the camera, and the other men 

104 




Robert Tatum raising the Stars and Stripes on the highest point 
in North America. 

This photograph was exposed upon a previous exposure. 



The Stars and Stripes 

were in like case; indeed, our hands were by this 
time so numb as to make it almost impossible to 
operate a camera at all. A number of photo- 
graphs had been taken, though not half we should 
have liked to take, but it is probable that, how- 
ever many more exposures had been made, they 
would have been little better than those we got. 
Our top-of-the-mountain photography was a great 
disappointment. One thing we learned: expo- 
sures at such altitude should be longer than those 
below, perhaps owing to the darkness of the sky. 
When the mercurial barometer had been read 
the tent was thrown down and abandoned, the 
first of the series of abandonments that marked 
our descent from the mountain. The tent-pole 
was used for a moment as a flagstaff while Tatum 
hoisted a Httle United States flag he had patiently 
and skilfully constructed in our camps below out 
of two silk handkerchiefs and the cover of a sew- 
ing-bag. Then the pole was put to its permanent 
use. It had already been carved with a suitable 
inscription, and now a transverse piece, already 
prepared and fitted, was lashed securely to it and 
it was planted on one of the little snow turrets of 
the summit — the sign of our redemption, high 
above North America. Only some peaks in the 
Andes and some peaks in the Himalayas rise above 



The Ascent of Denali 

it in all the world. It was of light, dry birch and, 
though six feet in length, so slender that we think 
it may weather many a gale. And Walter thrust 
it into the snow so firmly at a blow that it could 
not be withdrawn again. Then we gathered about 
it and said the Te Deum. 

It was 1.30 p. M. when we reached the summit 
and two minutes past three when we left; yet 
so quickly had the time flown that we could not 
beHeve we had been an hour and a half on top. 
The journey down was a long, weary grind, the 
longer and the wearier that we made a detour and 
went out of our way to seek for Professor Parker's 
thermometer, which he had left "in a crack on 
the west side of the last boulder of the north- 
east ridge." That sounds definite enough, yet in 
fact it is equivocal. "Which is the last boulder?" 
we disputed as we went down the slope. A long 
series of rocks almost in line came to an end, with 
one rock a little below the others, a little out of 
the line. This egregious boulder would, it seemed 
to me, naturally be called the last; Karstens 
thought not — thought the "last boulder" was the 
last on the ridge. As we learned later, Karstens 
was right, and since he yielded to me we did not 
find the thermometer, for, having descended to 
this isolated rock, we would not climb up again 

106 



Possible Temperatures 

for fifty thermometers. One's disappointment is 
qualified by the knowledge that the thermometer 
is probably not of adequate scale, Professor Par- 
ker's recollection being that it read only to 60*' 
below zero, F. A lower temperature than this is 
recorded every winter on the Yukon River. 

A thermometer reading to 100° below zero, left 
at this spot, would, in my judgment, perhaps 
yield a lower minimum than has ever yet been 
authentically recorded on earth, and it is most 
unfortunate that the opportunity was lost. Yet I 
did not leave my own alcohol minimum — scaled 
to 95° below zero, and yielding, by estimation, per- 
haps ten degrees below the scaling — there, because 
of the difficulty of giving explicit directions that 
should lead to its ready recovery, and at the close 
of such a day of toil as is involved in reaching 
the summit, men have no stomach for prolonged 
search. As will be told, it is cached lower down, 
but at a spot where it cannot be missed. 

However, for one, the writer was largely uncon- 
scious of weariness in that descent. All the way 
down, my thoughts were occupied with the glori- 
ous scene my eyes had gazed upon and should 
gaze upon never again. In all human probabil- 
ity I would never climb that mountain again; 
yet if I climbed it a score more times I would 

107 



The Ascent of Denali 

never be likely to repeat such vision. Commonly, 
only for a few hours at a time, never for more than 
a few days at a time, save in the dead of winter 
when climbing is out of the question, does Denali 
completely unveil himself and dismiss the clouds 
from all the earth beneath him. Not for long, with 
these lofty colds contiguous, will the vapors of 
Cook's Inlet and Prince William Sound and the 
whole North Pacijfic Ocean refrain from sweeping 
upward; their natural trend is hitherward. As the 
needle turns to the magnet so the clouds find an 
irresistible attraction in this great mountain mass, 
and though the inner side of the range be rid of 
them the sea side is commonly filled to overflowing. 
Only those who have for long years cherished 
a great and almost inordinate desire, and have had 
that desire gratified to the limit of their expec- 
tation, can enter into the deep thankfulness and 
content that filled the heart upon the descent of 
this mountain. There was no pride of conquest, 
no trace of that exultation of victory some enjoy 
upon the first ascent of a lofty peak, no gloat- 
ing over good fortune that had hoisted us a few 
hundred feet higher than others who had strug- 
gled and been discomfited. Rather was the feel- 
ing that a privileged communion with the high 
places of the earth had been granted; that not 

io8 



The Te Deum 

only had we been permitted to lift up eager eyes 
to these summits, secret and solitary since the 
world began, but to enter boldly upon them, to 
take place, as it were, domestically in their hitherto 
sealed chambers, to inhabit them, and to cast our 
eyes down from them, seeing all things as they 
spread out from the windows of heaven itself. 

Into this strong yet serene emotion, into this 
reverent elevation of spirit, came with a shock a 
recollection of some recent reading. 

Oh, wisdom of man and the apparatus of the 
sciences, the little columns of mercury that sling 
up and down, the vacuum boxes that expand 
and contract, the hammer that chips the highest 
rocks, the compass that takes the bearings of gla- 
cier and ridge — all the equipage of hypsometry 
and geology and geodesy — how pitifully feeble 
and childish it seems to cope with the majesty of 
the mountains! Take them all together, haul 
them up the steep, and as they He there, read, 
recorded, and done for, which shall be more ade- 
quate to the whole scene — their records.'' — or that 
simple, ancient hymn, "We praise Thee, O God! 
— Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of 
Thy Glory!" What an astonishing thing that, 
standing where we stood and seeing what we saw, 
there are men who should be able to deduce this 

109 



The Ascent of Denali 

law or that from their observation of its working 
and yet be unable to see the Lawgiver! — who 
should be able to push back effect to immediate 
cause and yet be blind to the Supreme Cause of 
All Causes; who can say, "This is the glacier's 
doing and it is marvellous in our eyes," and not 
see Him *'Who in His Strength setteth fast the 
mountains and is girded with power," Whose ser- 
vants the glaciers, the snow, and the ice are, "wind 
and storm fulfiUing His Word"; who exult in the 
exercise of their own intelligences and the play- 
things those inteUigences have constructed and yet 
deny the Omniscience that endowed them with 
some minute fragment of Itself! It was not always 
so; it was not so with the really great men who 
have advanced our knowledge of nature. But of 
late years hordes of small men have given them- 
selves up to the study of the physical sciences 
without any study preliminary. It would almost 
seem nowadays that whoever can sit in the seat 
of the scornful may sit in the seat of learning. 

A good many years ago, on an occasion already 
referred to, the writer roamed through the depths 
of the Grand Canon with a chance acquaintance 
who described himself as "Herpetologist to the 
Academy of Sciences" in some Western or Mid- 
Western State, and as this gentleman found the 

no 



The Scientists 

curious little reptiles he was in search of under a 
root or in a cranny of rock he repeated their many- 
syllabled names. Curious to know what these 
names literally meant and whence derived, the 
writer made inquiry, sometimes hazarding a con- 
jectural etymology. To his astonishment and 
dismay he found this "scientist," whom he had 
looked up to, entirely ignorant of the meaning of 
the terms he employed. They were just arbi- 
trary terms to him. The little hopping and crawl- 
ing creatures might as well have been numbered, 
or called x, y, z, for any significance their formi- 
dable nomenclature held for him. Yet this man 
had been keenly sarcastic about the Noachian 
deluge and had jeered from the height of his su- 
periority at hoary records which he knew only 
at second-hand reference, and had laid it down 
that if the human race became extinct the birds 
would stand the best chance of "evolving a pri- 
mate"! Since that time other "scientists" have 
been encountered, with no better equipment, with 
no history, no poetry, no philosophy in any broad 
sense, men with no letters — illiterate, strictly 
speaking — yet with all the dogmatism in the world. 
Can any one be more dogmatic than your modern 
scientist .f' The reproach has passed altogether to 
him from the theologian. 

Ill 



The Ascent of Denali 

The thing grows, and its menace and scandal 
grow with it. Since coming "outside" the writer 
has encountered a professor at a college, a Ph.D. 
of a great university, who confessed that he had 
never heard of certain immortal characters of 
Dickens whose names are household words. We 
shall have to open Night-Schools for Scientists, 
where men who have been deprived of all early 
advantages may learn the rudiments of English 
literature. One wishes that Dickens himself might 
have dealt with their pretensions, but they are since 
his day. And surely it is time some one started 
a movement for suppressing illiterate Ph.D.'s. 

Of this class, one feels sure, are the scientific 
heroes of the sensational articles in the monthly 
magazines of the baser sort, of which we picked 
up a number in the Kantishna on our way to 
the mountain. Here, in a picture that seems to 
have obtruded itself bodily into a page of letter- 
press, or else to have suffered the accidental ir- 
ruption of a page of letter-press all around it, you 
shall see a grave scientist looking anxiously down 
a very large microscope, and shall read that he 
has transferred a kidney from a cat to a dog, and 
therefore we can no longer believe in the immor- 
tality of the soul; or else that he has succeeded in 
artificially fertilizing the ova of a starfish — or was 

112 



The Psalmist and Dr. Johnson 

it a jellyfish? — and therefore there is no God; 
not just in so many bald words, of course, but in 
unmistakable import. Or it may be — so com- 
monly does the crassest credulity go hand in 
hand with the blankest scepticism — he has dis- 
covered the germ of old age and is hot upon the 
track of another germ that shall destroy it, so 
that we may all live virtually as long as we like; 
which, of course, disposes once for all of a world 
to come. The Psalmist was not always complai- 
sant or even temperate in his language, but he 
lived a long time ago and must be pardoned; his 
curt summary stands: "Dixit insipiens!" But 
the writer vows that if he were addicted to the 
pursuit of any branch of physical knowledge he 
would insist upon being called by the name of 
that branch. He would be a physiologist or a 
biologist or an anatomist or even a herpetolo- 
gist, but none should call him "scientist." As 
Doll Tearsheet says in the second part of "King 
Henry IV": "These villains will make the word 
as odious as the word 'occupy'; which was an ex- 
cellent good word before it was ill-sorted." If 
Doctor Johnson were compiling an English dic- 
tionary to-day he would define "scientist" some- 
thing thus: "A cant name for an experimenter 
in some department of physical knowledge, com- 

113 



The Ascent of Denali 

monly furnished with arrogance and dogmatism, 
but devoid of real learning." 

Here is no gibe at the physical sciences. To 
sneer at them were just as foolish as to sneer at 
religion. What we could do on this expedition in 
a "scientific" way we did laboriously and zeal- 
ously. We would never have thought of attempt- 
ing the ascent of the mountain without bringing 
back whatever little addition to human knowledge 
was within the scope of our powers and opportu- 
nities. Tatum took rounds of angles, in practice 
against the good fortune of a clear day on top, 
on every possible occasion. The sole personal 
credit the present writer takes concerning the 
whole enterprise is the packing of that mercurial 
barometer on his back, from the Tanana River 
nearly to the top of the mountain, a point at 
which he was compelled to relinquish it to another. 
He has always had his opinion about mountain 
climbers who put an aneroid in their pocket and 
go to the top of a great, new peak and come down 
confidently announcing its height. But when all 
this business is done as closely and carefull}^ as 
possible, and every observation taken that there 
are instruments devised to record, surely the 
soul is dead that feels no more and sees no further 
than the instruments do, that stirs with no other 

114 



The Amber Glasses Again 

emotion than the mercury in the tube or the dial 
at its point of suspension, that is incapable of awe, 
of reverence, of worshipful uplift, and does not 
feel that "the Lord even the most mighty God 
hath spoken, and called the world from the rising 
of the sun even to the going down of the same," 
in the wonders displayed before his eyes. 

We reached our eighteen-thousand-foot camp 
about five o'clock, a weary but happy crew. It 
was written in the diary that night: "I remember 
no day in my Hfe so full of toil, distress, and ex- 
haustion, and yet so full of happiness and keen 
gratification." 

The culminating day should not be allowed to 
pass without another tribute to the efficiency of 
the amber glasses. Notwithstanding the glare of 
the sun at twenty thousand feet and upward, no 
one had the slightest irritation of the eyes. There 
has never been an April of travel on the Yukon in 
eight years that the writer has not suffered from 
inflammation of the eyes despite the darkest 
smoke-colored glasses that could be procured. A 
naked candle at a road-house would give a stab 
of pain every time the eyes encountered it, and 
reading would become almost impossible. The 
amber glasses, however, while leaving vision al- 

"5 



The Ascent of Denali 

most as bright as without them, filter out the 
rays that cause the irritation and afford perfect 
protection against the consequences of sun and 
glare. There is only one improvement to make 
in the amber glasses, and that is some device of 
air-tight cells that shall prevent them from fog- 
ging when the cold on the outside of the glass con- 
denses the moisture of perspiration on the inside 
of the glass. We use double-glazed sashes with 
an air space between on all windows in our houses 
in Alaska and find ourselves no longer incommoded 
by frost on the panes; some adaptation of this 
principle should be within the skill of the optician 
and would remove a very troublesome defect in 
all snow-glasses. 

If some one would invent a preventive against 
shortness of breath as efficient as amber glasses 
are against snow-blindness, climbing at great alti- 
tudes would lose all its terrors for one mountaineer. 
So far as it was possible to judge, no other member 
of the party was near his altitude Hmit. There 
seemed no reason why Karstens and Walter in 
particular should not go another ten thousand feet, 
were there a mountain in the world ten thousand 
feet higher than Denali, but the writer knows that 
he himself could not have gone much higher. 



ii6 



CHAPTER VI 
THE RETURN 

THE next day was another bright, cloudless 
day, the second and last of them. Perhaps 
never did men abandon as cheerfully stuff that 
had been freighted as laboriously as we abandoned 
our surplus baggage at the eighteen-thousand-foot 
camp. We made a great pile of it in the lee of 
one of the ice-blocks of the glacier — food, coal- 
oil, clothing, and bedding — covering all with the 
wolf-robe and setting up a shovel as a mark; 
though just why we cached it so carefully, or for 
whom, no one of us would be able to say. It will 
probably be a long time ere any others camp in 
that Grand Basin. While yet such a peak is un- 
climbed, there is constant goading of mountain- 
eering minds to its conquest; once its top has been 
reached, the incentive declines. Much exploring 
work is yet to do on Denali; the day will doubt- 
less come when all its peaks and ridges and gla- 
ciers will be duly mapped, but our view from 
the summit agreed with our study of its con- 

117 



The Ascent of Denali 

formation during the ascent, that no other route 
will be found to the top. When first we were 
cutting and climbing on the ridge, and had 
glimpses, as the mists cleared, of the glacier on 
the other side and the ridges that arose from it, 
we thought that perhaps they might afford a pas- 
sage, but from above the appearance changed and 
seemed to forbid it altogether. At times, almost 
in despair at the task which the Northeast Ridge 
presented, we would look across at the ice-covered 
rocks of the North Peak and dream that they 
might be climbed, but they are really quite im- 
possible. The south side has been tried again and 
again and no approach discovered, nor did it ap- 
pear from the top that such approach exists; the 
west side is sheer precipice; the north side is 
covered with a great hanging glacier and is devoid 
of practicable slopes; it has been twice attempted. 
Only on the northeast has the glacier cut so 
deeply into the mountain as to give access to the 
heights. 

June 8th was Sunday, but we had to take ad- 
vantage of the clear, bright day to get as far 
down the mountain as possible. The stuff it was 
still necessary to pack made good, heavy loads, 
and we knew not what had happened to our stair- 
case in our absence. 

ii8 



The Record 

Having said Morning Prayer, we left at 9. 30 a. m., 
after a night in which all of us slept soundly — the 
first sound sleep some had enjoyed for a long time. 
Contentment and satisfaction are great somnifa- 
cients. The Grand Basin was glorious in sun- 
shine, the peaks crystal-clear against a cloudless 
sky, the huge blocks of ice thrown down by the 
earthquake and scattered all over the glacier 
gleamed white in the sunshine, deep-blue in the 
shadow. We wound our way downward, pass- 
ing camp site after camp site, until at the first 
place we camped in the Grand Basin we stopped 
for lunch. Then we made the traverse under the 
cliffs to the Parker Pass, which we reached at 
1.30 p. M. The sun was hot; there was not a 
breath of wind; we were exceedingly thirsty and 
we decided to light the primus stove and make 
a big pot of tea and replenish the thermos bot- 
tles before attempting the descent of the ridge. 
While this was doing a place was found to cache 
the minimum thermometer and a tin can that 
had held a photographic film, in which we had 
placed a record of our ascent. Above, we had 
not found any distinctive place in which a record 
could be deposited with the assurance that it 
would be found by any one seeking it. One feels 
sure that in the depth of winter very great cold 

119 



The Ascent of Denali 

must occur even at this elevation. Yet we should 
have Hked to leave it much higher. Without 
some means, which we did not possess, of mark- 
ing a position, there would, however, have been 
little use in leaving it amid the boulders where 
we hunted unsuccessfully for Professor Parker's 
instrument. We had hoped to be able to grave 
some sign upon the rocks with the geological ham- 
mer, but the first time it was brought down upon 
the granite its point splintered in the same ex- 
asperating way that the New York dealer's fancy 
ice-axes behaved when It was attempted to put 
them to practical use. "Warranted cast steel" 
upon an implement ought to be a warning not to 
purchase it for mountain work. Tool-steel alone 
will serve. 

Our little record cache at the Parker Pass, 
placed at the foot of the west or upward-facing 
side of the great slab which marks the natural 
camping site, should stand there for many years. 
It is not a place where snow lies deep or long, and 
it will surely be found by any who seek it. We 
took our last looks up into the Grand Basin, still 
brilliant in the sunshine, our last looks at the 
summit, still cloudless and clear. There was a 
melancholy even in the midst of triumph in look- 
ing for the last time at these scenes where we had 

120 



Harper Glacier 

so greatly hoped and endeavored — and had been 
so amply rewarded. We recalled the eager ex- 
pectation with which we first gazed up between 
these granite slabs into the long-hidden basin, a 
week before, and there was sadness in the feel- 
ing that in all probability we should never have 
this noble view again. 

Before the reader turns his back upon the 
Grand Basin once for all, I should like to put a 
name upon the glacier it contains — since it is the 
fashion to name glaciers. I should Hke to call it 
the Harper Glacier, after my half-breed compan- 
ion of three years, who was the first human being 
to reach the summit of the mountain. This rea- 
son might suffice, but there is another and most 
interesting reason for associating the name Harper 
with this mountain. Arthur Harper, Walter's 
father, the pioneer of all Alaskan miners, "the 
first man who thought of trying the Yukon as a 
mining field so far as we know," as William Ogil- 
vie tells us in his "Early Days on the Yukon" * 
(and none had better opportunity of knowing 
than Ogilvie), was also the first man to make writ- 
ten reference to this mountain, since Vancouver, 
the great navigator, saw it from the head of Cook's 
Inlet in 1794. 

* Ottawa: Thorburn & Abbott, 1913, p. 87. 
121 



The Ascent of Denali 

Arthur Harper, in company with Al. Mayo, 
made the earhest exploration of the Xanana River, 
ascending that stream in the summer of 1878 to 
about the present site of Fairbanks; and in a let- 
ter to E. W. Nelson, of the United States Biolog- 
ical Survey, then on the Alaskan coast. Harper 
wrote the following winter of the ''great ice moun- 
tain to the south" as one of the most wonderful 
sights of the trip.* It is pleasant to think that a 
son of his, yet unborn, was to be the first to set 
foot on its top; pleasantly also the office of set- 
ting his name upon the lofty glacier, the gleam 
from which caught his eye and roused his won- 
der thirty years ago, falls upon one who has been 
glad and proud to take, in some measure, his place. 

Then began the difficulty and the danger, the 
toil and the anxiety, of the descent of the ridge. 
Karstens led, then followed Tatum, then the 
writer, and then Walter. The unbroken surface 
of the ridge above the cleavage is sensationally 
steep, and during our absence nearly two feet of 
new snow had fallen upon it. The steps that had 
been shovelled as we ascended were entirely oblit- 
erated and it was necessary to shovel new ones; 
it was the very heat of the day, and by the can- 

* "Mt. McKinley Region": Alfred H. Brooks, Washington, 191 1, 
p. 25. 

122 




o 

3 



C 
& 

o 
-a 

tjo c 

C V 



■^a 



-a 



G 

'5) 



Descent 

ons of climbing we should have camped at the 
Pass and descended in the early morning. But 
all were eager to get down, and we ventured it. 
Now that our task was accomplished, our minds 
reverted to the boy at the base camp long anx- 
iously expecting us, and we thought of him and 
spoke of him continually and speculated how he 
had fared. One feels upon reflection that we 
took more risk in descending that ridge than we 
took at any time in the ascent. But Karstens 
was most cautious and careful, and in the long 
and intensive apprenticeship of this expedition 
had become most expert. I sometimes wondered 
whether Swiss guides would have much to teach 
either him or Walter in snow-craft; their chief 
instruction would probably be along the line of 
taking more chances, wisely. If the writer had 
to ascend this mountain again he would intrust 
himself to Karstens and Walter rather than to 
any Swiss guides he has known, for ice and snow 
in Alaska are not quite the same as ice and snow 
in the Alps or the Canadian Rockies. 

The loose snow was shovelled away and the 
steps dug in the hard snow beneath, and the 
creepers upon our feet gave good grip in it. Thus, 
slowly, step by step, we descended the ridge and 
in an hour and a half had reached the cleavage, 

123 



The Ascent of Denali 

the most critical place in the whole descent. With 
the least possible motion of the feet, setting them 
exactly in the shovelled steps, we crept like 
cats across this slope, thrusting the points of our 
axes into the holes that had been made in the 
ice-wall above, moving all together, the rope al- 
ways taut, no one speaking a word. When once 
Karstens was anchored on the further ice he 
stood and gathered up the rope as first one and 
then another passed safely to him and anchored 
himself beside him, until at last we were all across. 
Then, stooping to pass the overhanging ice-cliff 
that here also disputed the pack upon one's back, 
we went down to the long, long stretch of jagged 
pinnacles and bergs, and our intricate staircase in 
the masonry of them. Shovelling was necessary 
all the way down, but the steps were there, need- 
ing only to be uncovered. Passing our ridge 
camp, passing the danger of the great gable, down 
the rocks by which we reached the ridge and 
down the slopes to the glacier floor we went, 
reaching our old camp at 9.30 p. M., six and a 
quarter hours from the Parker Pass, twelve hours 
from the eighteen-thousand-foot camp in the 
Grand Basin, our hearts full of thankfulness that 
the terrible ridge was behind us. Until we 
reached the glacier floor the weather had been 

124 



The Glacier Camp 

clear; almost immediately thereafter the old fa- 
miliar cloud smother began to pour down from 
above and we saw the heights no more. 

The camp was in pretty bad shape. The snow 
that had fallen upon it had melted and frozen to 
ice, in the sun's rays and the night frosts, and 
weighed the tent down to the ground. But an 
hour's work made it habitable again, and we glee- 
fully piled the stove with the last of our wood and 
used the last spoonfuls of a can of baking-powder 
to make a batch of biscuits, the first bread we had 
eaten in two weeks. 

Next day we abandoned the camp, leaving all 
standing, and, putting our packs upon a Yukon 
sled, rejecting the ice-creepers, and resuming our 
rough-locked snow-shoes, we started down the 
glacier in soft, cloudy weather to our base camp. 
Again it had been wiser to have waited till night, 
that the snow bridges over the crevasses might be 
at their hardest; but we could not wait. Every 
mind was occupied with Johnny. We were two 
weeks overstayed of the time we had told him to 
expect our return, and we knew not what might 
have happened to the boy. The four of us on one 
rope, Karstens leading and Walter at the gee-pole, 
we went down the first sharp descents of the gla- 
ciers without much trouble, the new, soft snow 

125 



The Ascent of Denali 

making a good brake for the sled. But lower 
down the crevasses began to give us trouble. The 
snow bridges were melted at their edges, and some- 
times the sled had to be lowered down to the por- 
tion that still held and hauled up at the other side. 
Sometimes a bridge gave way as its edge was 
cautiously ventured upon with the snow-shoes, and 
we had to go far over to the glacier wall to get 
round the crevasse. The willows with which we 
had staked the trail still stood, sometimes just 
their tips appearing above the new snow, and they 
were a good guide, though we often had to leave 
the old trail. At last the crevasses were all 
passed and we reached the lower portion of the 
glacier, which is free of them. Then the snow 
grew softer and softer, and our moccasined feet 
were soon wet through. Large patches of the 
black shale with which much of this glacier is 
covered were quite bare of snow, and the sled had 
to be hauled laboriously across them. Then we 
began to encounter pools of water, which at first 
we avoided, but they soon grew so numerous that 
we went right through them. 

The going grew steadily wetter and rougher and 
more disagreeable. The lower stretch of a glacier 
is an unhandsome sight in summer: all sorts of 
rock debris and ugly black shale, with discolored 

126 



Flowers 

melting ice and snow, intersected everywhere with 
streams of dirty water — this was what it had de- 
generated into as we reached the pass. The snow 
was entirely gone from the pass, so the sled was 
abandoned — left standing upright, with its gee- 
pole sticking in the air that if any one else ever 
chanced to want it it might readily be found. 
The snow-shoes were piled around it, and we re- 
sumed our packs and climbed up to the pass. 
The first thing that struck our eyes as we stood 
upon the rocks of the pass was a brilliant traihng 
purple moss flower of such gorgeous color that we 
all exclaimed at its beauty and wondered how it 
grew chnging to bare rock. It was the first bright 
color that we had seen for so long that it gave 
unquahfied pleasure to us all and was a foretaste 
of the enhancing delights that awaited us as we 
descended to the bespangled valley. If a man 
would know to the utmost the charm of flowers, 
let him exile himself among the snows of a lofty 
mountain during fifty days of spring and come 
down into the first full flush of summer. We 
could scarcely pass a flower by, and presently had 
our hands full of blooms like schoolgirls on a picnic. 
But although the first things that attracted our 
attention were the flowers, the next were the mos- 
quitoes. They were waiting for us at the pass 

127 



The Ascent of Denali 

and they gave us their warmest welcome. The 
writer took sharp blame to himself that, organizing 
and equipping this expedition, he had made no 
provision against these intolerable pests. But we 
had so confidently expected to come out a month 
earlier, before the time of mosquitoes arrived, 
that although the matter was suggested and dis- 
cussed it was put aside as unnecessary. Now 
there was the prospect of a fifty or sixty mile 
tramp across country, subject all the while to the 
assaults of venomous insects, which are a greater 
hindrance to summer travel in Alaska than any 
extremity of cold is to winter travel. 

Not even the mosquitoes, however, took our 
minds from Johnny, and a load was lifted from 
every heart when we came near enough to our 
camp to see that some one was moving about it. 
A shout brought him running, and he never 
stopped until he had met us and had taken the 
pack from my shoulders and put it on his own. 
Our happiness was now unalloyed; the last anxi- 
ety was removed. The dogs gave us most jubi- 
lant welcome and were fat and well favored. 

What a change had come over the place! All 
the snow was gone from the hills; the stream that 
gathered its three forks at this point roared over 
its rocks; the stunted willows were in full leaf; the 

128 




Johnny Fred who kept the base-camp and fed the dogs and 
would not touch the sugar. 



Johnny and the Sugar 

thick, soft moss of every dark shade of green and 
yellow and red made a foil for innumerable bril- 
liant flowers. The fat, gray conies chirped at us 
from the rocks; the ground-squirrels, greatly mul- 
tiplied since the wholesale destruction of foxes, 
kept the dogs unavaihngly chasing hither and 
thither whenever they were loose. We never 
grew tired of walking up and down and to and fro 
about the camp — it was a dehght to tread upon 
the moss-covered earth after so long treading upon 
nothing but ice and snow; it was a delight to gaze 
out through naked eyes after all those weeks in 
which we had not dared even for a few moments 
to lay aside the yellow glasses in the open air; 
it was a delight to see joyful, eager animal life 
around us after our sojourn in regions dead. Sup- 
per was a delight. Johnny had killed four moun- 
tain-sheep and a caribou while we were gone, and 
not only had fed the dogs well, but from time to 
time had put aside choice portions expecting our 
return. But what was most grateful to us and 
most extraordinary in him, the boy had saved, 
untouched, the small ration of sugar and milk 
left for his consumption, knowing that ours was 
all destroyed; and we enjoyed coffee with these 
luxurious appurtenances as only they can who 
have been long deprived of them. There are not 

129 



The Ascent of Denali 

many boys of fifteen or sixteen of any race who 
would voluntarily have done the like. 

The next day there was much to do. There 
were pack-saddles of canvas to make for the dogs' 
backs that they might help us carry our necessary 
stuff out; our own clothing and footwear to over- 
haul, bread to bake, guns to clean and oil against 
rust. Yet withal, we took it lazily, with five to 
divide these tasks, and napped and lay around and 
continually consumed biscuits and coffee which 
Johnny continually cooked. We all took at least 
a partial bath in the creek, cold as it was, the first 
bath in — well, in a long time. Mountain chmbers 
belong legitimately to the great unwashed. 

It was a day of perfect rest and contentment 
with hearts full of gratitude. Not a single mis- 
hap had occurred to mar the complete success of 
our undertaking — not an injury of any sort to any 
one, nor an illness. All five of us were in perfect 
health. Surely we had reason to be grateful; and 
surely we were happy in having Him to whom our 
gratitude might be poured out. What a bald, in- 
complete, and disconcerting thing it must be to 
have no one to thank for crowning mercies like 
these! 

On Tuesday, the loth June, we made our final 
abandonment, leaving the tent standing with stove 

130 



Across Country 

and food and many articles that we did not need 
cached in it, and with four of the dogs carrying 
packs and led with chains, packs on our own backs 
and the ice-axes for staves in our hands, we turned 
our backs upon the mountain and went down the 
valley toward the Clearwater. The going was not 
too bad until we had crossed that stream and 
climbed the hills to the rolling country between it 
and the McKinley Fork of the Kantishna. Again 
and again we looked back for a parting glimpse of 
the mountain, but we never saw sign of it any 
more. The foot-hills were clear, the rugged wall 
of the glacier cut the sky, but the great mountain 
might have been a thousand miles off for any 
visible indication it gave. It is easy to under- 
stand how travellers across equatorial Africa have 
passed near the base of the snowy peaks of Ru- 
wenzori without knowing they were even in the 
neighborhood of great mountains, and have come 
back and denied their existence. 

The broken country between the streams was 
difficult. Underneath was a thick elastic moss in 
which the foot sank three or four inches at every 
step and that makes toilsome travelHng. The 
mosquitoes were a constant annoyance. But the 
abundant bird life upon this open moorland, con- 
tinually reminding one as it did of moorlands in 

131 



The Ascent of Denali 

the north of England or of Scotland, was full of 
interest. Ptarmigan, half changed from their 
snowy plumage to the brown of summer, and pre- 
senting a curious piebald appearance, were there 
in great numbers, cackling their guttural cry with 
its concluding notes closely resembling the *'ko-ax, 
ko-ax" of the Frogs' Chorus in the comedy of 
Aristophanes; snipe whistled and curlews whirled 
all about us. Half-way across to the McKinley 
Fork it began to rain, thunder-peal succeeding 
thunder-peal, and each crash announcing a heavier 
downpour. Soon we were all wet through, and 
then the rain turned to hail that fell smartly until 
all the moss was white with it, and that gave place 
to torrents of rain again. Dog packs and men's 
packs were alike wet, and no one of us had a dry 
stitch on him when we reached the banks of the 
McKinley Fork and the old spacious hunting tent 
that stands there in which we were to spend the 
night. Rather hopelessly we hung our bedding 
to dry on ropes strung about some trees, and our 
wet clothing around the stove. By taking turns 
all the night in sitting up, to keep a fire going, 
we managed to get our clothes dried by morn- 
ing, but the bedding was wet as ever. Fortu- 
nately, the night was a warm one. 

The next morning there was the McKinley Fork 
132 



Glacial Streams 

to cross the first thing, and it was a difficult and 
disagreeable task. This stream, which drains the 
Muldrow Glacier and therefore the whole north- 
east face of Denali, occupies a dreary, desolate 
bed of boulder and gravel and mud a mile or more 
wide; rather it does not occupy it, save perhaps 
after tremendous rain following great heat, but 
wanders amid it, with a dozen channels of varying 
depth but uniform blackness, the inky solution 
of the shale which the mountain discharges so 
abundantly tingeing not only its waters but the 
whole Kantishna, into which it flows one hundred 
miles away. Commonly in the early morning the 
waters are low, the night frosts checking the melt- 
ing of the glacier ice; but this morning the drainage 
of yesterday's rain-storm had swollen them. 
Channel after channel was waded in safety until 
the main stream was reached, and that swept by, 
thigh-deep, with a rushing black current that had 
a very evil look. Karstens was scouting ahead, 
feeling for the shallower places, stemming the 
hurrying waters till they swept up to his waist. 
The dogs did not like the look of it and with their 
packs, still wet from yesterday, were hampered in 
swimming. Two that Tatum was leading sud- 
denly turned back when half-way across, and the 
chains, entangling his legs, pulled him over face 

133 



The Ascent of Denali 

foremost into the deepest of the water. His pack 
impeded his efforts to rise, and the water swept all 
over him. Karstens hurried back to his rescue, 
and he was extricated from his predicament, half 
drowned and his clothes filled with mud and sand. 
There was no real danger of drowning, but it was 
a particularly noxious ducking in icy filth. The 
sun was warm, however, and after basking upon 
the rocks awhile he was able to proceed, still wet, 
though he had stripped and wrung out his clothes 
— for we had no dry change — and very gritty in 
underwear, but taking no harm whatever. I think 
Tatum regretted losing, in the mad rush of black 
water, the ice-axe he had carried to the top of the 
mountain more than he regretted his wetting. 

On the further bank of the McKinley Fork we 
entered our first wood, a belt about three miles 
wide that lines the river. Our first forest trees 
gave us almost as much pleasure as our first 
flowers. Animal life abounded, all in the espe- 
cially interesting condition of rearing half-grown 
young. Squirrels from their nests scolded at our 
intrusion most vehemently; an owl flew up with 
such a noisy snapping and chattering that our 
attention was drawn to the point from which she 
rose, and there, perched upon a couple of rotten 
stumps a few feet apart, were two half-fledged 

134 



Birds and Beasts 

owlets, passive, immovable, which allowed them- 
selves to be photographed and even handled with- 
out any indication of life except in their wondering 
eyes and the circumrotary heads that contained 
them. Moose signs and bear signs were every- 
where; rabbits, now in their summer livery, flitted 
from bush to bush. That belt of wood was a 
zoological garden stocked with birds and mam- 
mals. And we rejoiced with them over their 
promising famihes and harmed none. 

From the wood we rose again to the moorland — 
to the snipe and ptarmigan and curlews, some yet 
sitting upon belated eggs — to the heavy going of 
the moss and the yet heavier going of niggerhead. 
Our journey skirted a large lake picturesquely 
surrounded by hills, and we spoke of how pleas- 
antly a summer lodge might be placed upon its 
shores were it not for the mosquitoes. The in- 
cessant leaping of fish, the occasional flight of 
fowl alone disturbed the perfect reflection of cliff 
and hill in its waters. At times we followed game 
trails along its margin; at times swampy ground 
made us seek the hillside. 

Thus, slowly covering the miles that we had 
gone so quickly over upon the ice of the lake two 
months before, we reached Moose Creek and the 
miners' cabins at Eureka late at night and received 

135 



The Ascent of Denali 

warm welcome and most hospitable entertainment 
from Mr. Jack Hamilton. It was good to see 
men other than our own party again, good to 
sleep in a bed once more, good to regale ourselves 
with food long strange to our mouths. Here we 
had our first intimation of any happenings in the 
outside world for the past three months and sor- 
rowed that Saint Sophia was still to remain a 
Mohammedan temple, and that the kindly King 
of Greece had been murdered. Here also Hamil- 
ton generously provided us with spare mosquito- 
netting for veils, and we found a package of can- 
vas gloves I had ordered from Fairbanks long 
before, and so were protected from our chief ene- 
mies. From Moose Creek we went over the hills 
to Caribou Creek and again were most kindly 
welcomed and entertained by Mr. and Mrs. Quig- 
ley, and discussed our climb for a long while 
with McGonogill of the "pioneer" party. Then, 
mainly down the bed of Glacier Creek, now 
on lingering ice or snow-drift, with the water 
rushing underneath, now on the rocks, now 
through the brush, crossing and recrossing the 
creek, we reached the long line of desolate, decay- 
ing houses known as Glacier City, and found 
convenient refuge in one of the cabins therein, 
still maintained as an occasional abode. On the 

136 




"Muk," the author's pet malamute. 



The Boat 

outskirts of the "city" next morning a moose and 
two calves sprang up from the brush, our ap- 
proach over the moss not giving enough notice to 
awake her from sleep until we were almost upon 
her. 

Instead of pursuing our way across the in- 
creasingly difficult and swampy country to the 
place where our boat and supplies lay cached, we 
turned aside at midday to the "fish camp" on 
the Bearpaw, and, after enjoying the best our host 
possessed from the stream and from his early 
garden, borrowed his boat, choosing twenty miles 
or so on the water to nine of niggerhead and 
marsh. But the river was very low and we had 
much trouble getting the boat over riffles and bars, 
so that it was late at night when we reached that 
other habitation of dragons known as Diamond 
City. While we submerged our cached poling 
boat to swell its sun-dried seams, Walter and 
Johnny returned the borrowed boat, and, since 
the stream had fallen yet more, were many hours 
in reaching the fish camp and in tramping back. 

But the labor of the return journey was now 
done. A canvas stretched over willows made a 
shelter for the centre of the boat, and at noon on 
the second day men, dogs, and baggage were 
embarked, to float down the Bearpaw to the 

^37 



The Ascent of Denali 

Kantishna, to the Tanana, to the Yukon. The 
Bearpaw swarmed with animal Hfe. Geese and 
ducks, with their little terrified broods, scooted 
ahead of us on the water, the mothers presently 
leaving their young in a nook of the bank and 
making a flying detour to return to them. Some- 
times a duck would simulate a broken wing to 
lure us away from the little ones. We had no 
meat and were hungry for the usual early sum- 
mer diet of water-fowl, but not hungry enough to 
kill these birds. Beaver dropped noisily into the 
water from trees that exhibited their marvellous 
carpentry, some lying prostrate, some half chis- 
elled through. It seemed, indeed, as though the 
beaver were preparing great irrigation works all 
through this country. Since the law went into 
effect prohibiting their capture until 191 5 they 
have increased and multiplied all over interior 
Alaska. They are still caught by the natives, 
but since their skins cannot be sold the Indians 
are wearing beaver garments again to the great 
advantage of health in the severe winters. One 
wishes very heartily that the prohibition might 
be made perpetual, for only so will fur become the 
native wear again. It is good to see the children, 
particularly, in beaver coats and breeches instead 
of the wretched cotton that otherwise is almost 



The Beaver and the Indians 

their only garb. Would it be altogether beyond 
reason to hope that a measure which was enacted 
to prevent the extermination of an animal might 
be perpetuated on behalf of the survival of an 
interesting and deserving race of human beings 
now sorely threatened? Or is it solely the conser- 
vation of commercial resources that engages the 
attention of government ? There are few measures 
that would redound more to the physical benefit 
of the Alaskan Indian than the perpetuating of 
the law against the sale of beaver skins. With 
the present high and continually appreciating 
price of skins, none of the common people of the 
land, white or native, can afford to wear furs. 
Such a prohibition as has been suggested would 
restore to Alaskans a small share in the resources 
of Alaska. Is there any country in the world 
where furs are actually needed more.^ 

Not only beaver, but nearly all fur and game 
animals have greatly increased in the Kantishna 
country. In the year of the stampede, when thou- 
sands of men spent the winter here, there was 
wholesale destruction of game and trapping of 
fur. But the country, left to itself, is now re- 
stocked of game and fur, except of foxes, the high 
price of which has almost exterminated them here 
and is rapidly exterminating them throughout in- 

139 



The Ascent of Denali 

terior Alaska. They have been poisoned in the 
most reckless and unscrupulous way, and there 
seems no means of stopping it under the present 
law. We saw scarcely a fox track in the country, 
though a few years ago they were exceedingly 
plentiful all over the foot-hills of the great range. 
Mink, marten, and muskrat were seen from time 
to time swimming in the river; a couple of year- 
ling moose started from the bank where they had 
been drinking as we noiselessly turned a bend; 
brilliant kingfishers flitted across the water. So 
down these rivers we drifted, sometimes in sun- 
shine, sometimes in rain, until early in the morn- 
ing of the 20th June, we reached Tanana, and our 
journey was concluded three months and four 
days after it was begun. When the telegraph 
office opened at 8 o'clock a message was sent, in 
accordance with promise, to a Seattle paper, and 
it illustrates the rapidity with which news is 
spread to-day that a ship in Bering Sea, approach- 
ing Nome, received the news from Seattle by wire- 
less telegraph before 1 1 a. M. But a message from 
the Seattle paper received the same morning 
asking for "five hundred more words describing 
narrow escapes" was left unanswered, for, thank 
God, there were none to describe. 



140 



CHAPTER VII 

THE HEIGHT OF DENALI, WITH A 
DISCUSSION OF THE READINGS 
ON THE SUMMIT AND DUR- 
ING THE ASCENT 

THE determination of the heights of moun- 
tains by triangulation is, of course, the 
method that in general commends itself to the 
topographer, though it may be questioned whether 
the very general use of aneroids for barometric 
determinations has not thrown this latter means of 
measuring altitudes into undeserved discredit 
when the mercurial barometer is used instead of 
its convenient but unreliable substitute. 

The altitude given on the present maps for 
Denali is the mean of determinations made by tri- 
angulation by three different men: Muldrow on 
the Sushitna* side in 1898, Raeburn on the Kus- 
kokwim side in 1902, and Porter, from the Yentna 

* "Sushitna" represents unquestionably the native pronunciation 
and the "h" should be retained. The reason for its elision current 
in Alaska is too contemptible to be referred to further. Perhaps the 
same genius removed this "h" who removed the '"s" from the 
"Cook's Inlet" of the British admiralty. One is not surprised when 

141 



The Ascent of Denali 

country in 1906. In addition, a determination 
was made by the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 
1910, from points near Cook's Inlet. "The work 
of the Coast Survey," writes Mr. Alfred Brooks, 
"is more refined than the rough triangulation 
done by our men; at the same time they were 
much further away." "It is a curious coinci- 
dence," he adds, "that the determination made 
by the Coast Survey was the mean which we had 
assumed from our three determinations" (twenty 
thousand three hundred feet). 

There are, however, two sources of error in the 
determination of the height of this mountain by 
triangulation — a general one and a particular one. 
The general one lies in the difficulty of ascertain- 
ing the proper correction to be applied for the 
refraction of the atmosphere, and the higher the 
mountain the greater the liability to this error; 
for not much is positively known about the angle 
of refraction of the upper regions of the air. The 
officers of the Trigonometrical Survey of India 

a post-ofRce at Cape Prince of Wales is named "Wales" because one 
is not surprised at any banalities of the postal department — in Alaska 
or elsewhere, but one expects better things from the cultured branches 
of the government service. It is interesting to speculate what will 
happen to Revillegigedo Island, which Vancouver named for the 
viceroy of Mexico who was kind to him, when the official curtailer 
of names finds time to attend to it. If there be a post-office thereon 
it is probably already named " Gig." 

142 



Theodolites and Barometers 

have published their opinion that the heights of 
the great peaks of the Himalayas will have to be 
revised on this account. The report of the Coast 
Survey*s determination of the height of Denali 
claims a "co-efficient of refraction nearer the 
truth" than the figure used on a previous occa- 
sion; but a very slight difference in this factor 
will make a considerable difference in the result. 

The particular source of error in the case of this 
mountain lies in the circumstance that its sum- 
mit is flat, and there is no culminating point upon 
which the cross-hairs of the surveying instrument 
may intersect. 

The barometric determination of heights is, of 
course, not without similar troubles of its own. 
The tables of altitudes corresponding to pressures 
do not agree, Airy's table giving relatively greater 
altitudes for very low pressures than the Smith- 
sonian. All such tables as originally calculated 
are based upon the hypothesis of a temperature 
and humidity which decrease regularly with the 
altitude, and this is not always the case; nor is 
the "static equilibrium of the atmosphere" which 
Laplace assumed always maintained; that is to 
say an equal difference of pressure does not always 
correspond to an equal difference of altitude. 
There is, in point of fact, no absolute way to de- 

143 



The Ascent of Denali 

termine altitude save by running an actual line 
of levels; all other methods are approximations 
at best. But there had never been a barometric 
determination of the height of this mountain made, 
and it was resolved to attempt it on this expedi- 
tion. 

To this end careful arrangements were made 
and much labor and trouble undergone. The 
author carried his standard mercurial mountain 
barometer to Fort Gibbon on the Yukon in Sep- 
tember, 191 2, and compared it with the instru- 
ment belonging to the Signal Corps of the United 
States army at that post. A very close agreement 
was found in the two instruments; the reading of 
the one, by himself, and of the other, by the ser- 
geant whose regular duty it was to read and re- 
cord the instrument, being identical to two places 
of decimals at the same temperature. 

Arrangements were made with Captain Michel 
of the Signal Corps at Fort Gibbon, when the 
expedition started to the mountain in March, 
191 3, to read the barometer at that post three 
times a day and record the reading with the 
reading of the attached thermometer. Acknowl- 
edgment is here made of Captain Michel's cour- 
tesy and kindness in this essential co-operation. 
The reading at Fort Gibbon which most nearly 

144 



Readings on the Summit 

synchronizes with the reading on top of the 
mountain is the one taken at noon on the 7th 
June. The reading on top of the mountain was 
made at about 1.50 p. m., so that there was an 
hour and fifty minutes difference in time. The 
weather, however, was set fair, without a cloud 
in the sky, and had been for more than twelve 
hours before and remained so for thirty-six hours 
afterward. It would seem, therefore, that the 
difference in time is negligible. The reading at 
Fort Gibbon, a place of an altitude of three 
hundred and thirty-four feet above sea-level, at 
noon on the 7th June, was 29.590 inches with an at- 
tached thermometer reading 76.5° F. The reading 
on the summit of Denali, at 1.50 p. m. on the same 
day, was 13.617. The writer is greatly chagrined 
that he cannot give with the same confidence the 
reading of the attached thermometer on top of 
the mountain, but desires to set forth the circum- 
stances and give the readings in his note-book 
records. 

The note-book gives the air temperature on the 
summit as 7° F., taken by a standard alcohol min- 
imum thermometer, and it remained constant 
during the hour and a half we were there. The 
sun was shining, but a bitter north wind was blow- 
ing. But the reading of the thermometer at- 

145 



The Ascent of Denali 

tached to the barometer is recorded as 20° F. I 
am unable to account for this discrepancy of 13°. 
The mercurial barometer was swung on its tripod 
inside the instrument tent we had carried to the 
summit, a rough zero was established, and it was 
left for twenty minutes or so to adjust itself to 
conditions before an exact reading was taken. 
It was my custom throughout the ascent to read 
and record the thermometer immediately after 
the barometer was read, but it is almost certain 
that on this momentous occasion it was not done. 
Possibly the thermometer was read immediately 
the instrument was taken out of its leather case 
and its wooden case and set up, while it yet re- 
tained some of the animal heat of the back 
that had borne it, and the reading was written 
in the prepared place. Then when the barom- 
eter was finally read, no temperature of the at- 
tached thermometer was noted. This is the only 
possible explanation that occurs, and it is very 
unsatisfactory. It was not until we were down 
at the base camp again that I looked at the fig- 
ures, and discovered their difference, and I could 
not then recall in detail the precise operations on 
the summit. It is hard to understand, ordina- 
rily, how any man could have recorded the two 
readings on the same page of the book without 

146 



In Exculpation 

noticing their discrepancy, but perhaps the ex- 
citement and difficulty of the situation combined 
to produce what Sir Martin Conway calls "high 
altitude stupidity." 

It is indeed impossible to convey to the reader 
who has never found himself circumstanced as we 
were an understanding of our perturbation of 
mind and body upon reaching the summit of the 
mountain: breathless with excitement — and with 
the altitude — hearts afire and feet nigh frozen. 
What should be done on top, what first, what 
next, had been carefully planned and even re- 
hearsed, but we were none of us schooled in stoical 
self-repression to command our emotions com- 
pletely. Here was the crown of nearly three 
months' toil — and of all those long years of desire 
and expectation. It was hard to gather one's 
wits and resolutely address them to prearranged 
tasks; hard to secure a sufficient detachment of 
mind for careful and accurate observations. The 
sudden outspreading of the great mass of Denali's 
Wife immediately below us and in front of us was 
of itself a surprise that was dramatic and dis- 
concerting; a splendid vision from which it was 
difficult to withdraw the eyes. We knew, of course, 
the companion peak was there, but had forgotten 
all about her, having had no slightest glimpse of 

147 



The Ascent of Denali 

her on the whole ascent until at the one stroke 
she stood completely revealed. Not more daz- 
zling to the eyes of the pasha in the picture was 
the form of the lovely woman when the slave 
throws off the draperies that veiled her from head 
to foot. Moreover, problems that had been dis- 
cussed and disputed, questions about the confor- 
mation of the mountain and the possibilities of 
approach to it, were now soluble at a glance and 
clamored for solution. We held them back and 
fell at once to our scientific work, denying any 
gratification of sight until these tasks were per- 
formed, yet it is plain that I at least was not 
proof against the disturbing consciousness of the 
wonders that waited. 

It was bitterly cold, yet my fingers, though 
numb, were usable when I reached the top; it 
was in exposing them to manipulate the hypso- 
metrical instruments that they lost all feeling and 
came nigh freezing. And breathlessness was nat- 
urally at its worst; I remember that even the ex- 
ertion of rising from the prone position it was 
necessary to assume to read the barometer brought 
on a fit of panting. 

With these circumstances in mind we will re- 
sume the discussion of the readings taken on the 
summit and their bearing upon the altitude of 

148 



Calculations for Altitude 

the mountain. It seems right to disregard the 
temperature recorded for the attached thermom- 
eter, and to use the air temperature, of which 
there is no doubt, in correcting the barometric 
reading. So they stand; 

Bar. Temp. 

13.617 inches 7"* F. 

The boihng-point thermometer stood at 174.9° F. 
when the steam was pouring out of the vent. 
They stand therefore: 

Gibbon (334 feet altitude) The Summit of Denali 

Bar. Then Bar. Then 

29.590 76.5° F. 13.617 7° F. 

Now, the tables accessible to the writer do not 
work out their calculations beyond eighteen thou- 
sand feet, and he confesses himself too long un- 
used to mathematical labors of any kind for the 
task of extending them. He was, therefore, con- 
strained to fall back upon the kindness of Mr. 
Alfred Brooks, the head of the Alaskan Division 
of the United States Geological Survey, and Mr. 
Brooks turned over the data to Mr. C. E. Giffin, 
topographic engineer of that service, to which 
gentleman thankful acknowledgment is made for 
the result that follows. 

Ignoring a calculation based upon a tempera- 
149 



The Ascent of Denali 

ture of 20° F. on the summit, and another based 
upon a temperature of 13.5° F. on the summit (the 
mean of the air temperature and that recorded 
for the attached thermometer) and confining at- 
tention to the calculation which takes the air 
temperature of 7° F. as the proper figure for the 
correction of the barometer, a result is reached 
which shows the summit of Denali as twenty- 
one thousand and eight feet above the sea. It 
should be added that Mr. Gifiin obtained from the 
United States Weather Bureau the barometric 
and thermometric readings taken at Valdez on 
7th June about the same length of time after our 
reading on the summit as the reading at Gibbon 
was before ours. From these readings Mr. Giffin 
makes the altitude of the mountain twenty thou- 
sand three hundred and seventy-four feet above 
Valdez, which is ten feet above the sea-level. 
From this result Mr. Giffin is disposed to ques- 
tion the accuracy of the reading at Gibbon, 
though the author has no reason to doubt it was 
properly and carefully made. Valdez is much far- 
ther from the summit than Fort Gibbon and is 
in a different climatic zone. The calculation from 
the Valdez base should, however, be taken into 
consideration in making this barometric determi- 
nation, and the mean of the two results, twenty 

150 



Fort Gibbon and Valdez as Bases 

thousand six hundred and ninety-six feet, or, 
roundly, twenty thousand seven hundred feet^ is 
offered as the contribution of this expedition 
toward determining the true altitude of the 
mountain. 

The figures of Mr. Giffin's calculations touch- 
ing the altitude of this mountain and also de- 
termining the altitudes of various salient points 
or stages of the ascent of the mountain are 
printed below: 

DENALI (MOUNT McKINLEY) 

Using Air Thermometer Reading +7° and the Read- 
ing AT Fort Gibbon for Same Date 

Mount McKlnley, barometric read- 
ing 13.617 in. 

Barometer reduced to standard 
temperature +-027 " Temp. 7° 

13.644 in. 
Fort Gibbon, barometric reading . . 29.590 in. 
Barometer reduced to standard tem- 
perature -.128 " Temp. 76.5** 

29.462 in. 
Mount McKinley, corrected barom- 
eter 13.644 in. 21,324 ft. 

Fort Gibbon, corrected barometer. . 29.462 " 400" 

20,924 ft. 
151 



The Ascent of Denali 

Mean temperature, 41.7° — approxi- 
mate diflference in elevation 20,924 ft. — 3S6 ft. 

Latitude, 64° — approximate differ- 
ence in elevation 20,568 " +IS " 

Mean temperature, 41.7° — approxi- 
mate difference in elevation 20,568 " +71 " 

Elevation lowest, 400 — approximate 

difference in elevation 20,568 " +20 

Elevation above Fort Gibbon 20,674 ft. 

Elevation of Fort Gibbon 334 " 

Elevation above sea 21,008 ft. 

Using the Thermometric Reading of 7° at Mount 

McKlNLEY AND THE U. S. WeaTHER BuREAU ReADING 

AT Valdez for Same Date 

Mount McKinley, barometric read- 
ing 13.617 in. 

Barometer reduced to standard tem- 
perature +.027 " Temp. 7" 

13.644 in. 

Valdez, barometric reading 29.76 in. 

Barometer reduced to standard tem- 
perature 068 

29.692 in. Temp. 54° 
Mount McKinley, corrected baro- 
metric reading 13-644 in. 21,324 ft. 

Valdez, corrected barometric reading 29.692 " 190 

21,134 ft- 
Mean temperature, 30.5° — approxi- 
mate difference in elevation 21,134 ft. —840 

Latitude, 62° — approximate differ- 
ence in elevation 20,295 " +^8 

152 



Fort Gibbon and Valdez as Bases 

Mean temperature, 30.5° — approxi- 
mate difference in elevation. . . . 20,295 ft. +42 ft. 

Elevation lowest, 190 — approximate 

difference in elevation 20,295 " +20 " 

Elevation above Valdez 20,374 ft- 

Elevation of Valdez 10 " 

Elevation above sea 20,384 ft. 



ALTITUDES OF CAMPING STATIONS 

First Glacier Camp 

Glacier Camp, barometric reading. 22.554 in. Temp. 81" 
Barometer reduced to standard tem- 
perature —.106 " 

22.448 in. 
Fort Gibbon, barometric reading. . . 29.110 in. Temp. 74" 
Barometer reduced to standard tem- 
perature —.120 " 

28.990 in. 
Glacier Camp, corrected barometer 22.448 in. 7>79i ft. 

Fort Gibbon, corrected barometer. . 28.990 " 840 " 

6,951 ft. 

Mean temperature, 77.5° — approxi- 
mate difference in elevation 6,951 ft. +393 

Latitude, 64° — approximate differ- 
ence in elevation 7>343 " +5 

Mean temperature, 77.5° — approxi- 
mate difference in elevation 7»343 " +74 

Elevation lowest, 840 — approximate 

difference in elevation 7j343 " +3 

Elevation above Fort Gibbon 7^426 ft. 

Elevation of Fort Gibbon 334 

Elevation above sea 7>76o ft. 

153 



The Ascent of Denali 



Head of Muldrow Glacier 

Muldrow Glacier, barometric read- 
ing 19.640 in. Temp. 36° 

Barometer reduced to standard tem- 
perature — -013 " 

19.627 in. 
Fort Gibbon, barometric reading. . . 30.065 in. Temp. 71° 
Barometer reduced to standard tem- 
perature —115 " 

29.950 in. 
Muldrow Glacier, corrected barom- 
eter 19.627 in. 1 1,441 ft. 

Fort Gibbon, corrected barometer. . 29.950 " (— )4S " 

11,486 ft. 

Temperature, 53-5° — approximate 

difference in elevation 11,486 ft. +79 " 

Latitude, 65° — approximate differ- 
ence in elevation 1 1*565 " +8 " 

Mean temperature, 53.5° — approxi- 
mate difference in elevation II)S65 " +63 " 

Elevation lowest, 45 — approximate 

difference in elevation 1 1,565 " +6 " 

Elevation above Fort Gibbon 11,642 ft. 

Elevation of Fort Gibbon 334 " 

Elevation above sea 1 1,976 ft. 

Parker Pass 

Parker Pass, barometric reading. . . 17.330 in. Temp. 43° 
Barometer reduced to standard tem- 
perature —-023 " 

17.307 in. 
154 



Fort Gibbon and Valdez as Bases 

Fort Gibbon, barometric reading . . 30.050 in. Temp. 69.5° 
Barometer reduced to standard tem- 
perature —.Ill " 

29.939 in. 
Parker Pass, corrected barometer.. . 17.307 in. 14,861 ft. 
Fort Gibbon, corrected barometer. . 29.939 " (~)3S " 

14,896 ft. 

Mean temperature, 56.25° — approxi- 
mate difference in elevation 14,896 ft. +185 " 

Latitude, 64° — approximate differ- 
ence in elevation I5j09I " +11 " 

At temperature of 56.25° — approxi- 
mate difference in elevation I5>09i " +92 " 

Elevation lowest, —35° — approxi- 
mate difference in elevation I5>09i " +11 " 

Elevation above Fort Gibbon. I5>I95 ft. 

Elevation of Fort Gibbon 334 " 

Elevation above sea IS>S29 ft. 



Last Camp 

Last Camp, barometric reading. . . . 15.220 in. Temp. 40® 
Barometer reduced to standard tem- 
perature —.016 " 

15.204 in. 
Fort Gibbon, barometric reading. . . 29.660 in. 
Barometer reduced to standard tem- 
perature —.120 " Temp. 73.5° 

29.540 in. 
Last Camp, corrected barometer. . . 15.204 in. 18,382 ft. 
Fort Gibbon, corrected barometer.. 29.540 " 329 

18,053 ft. 
ISS 



The Ascent of Denali 

Mean temperature, 56.75° — approxi- 
mate diflFerence in elevation 18,053 ft. +248 ft. 

Latitude, 64° — approximate differ- 
ence in elevation 18,301 " -I-17 " 

Mean temperature, 56.75° — approxi- 
mate difference in elevation 18,301 " +112 " 

Elevation lowest, 329 — approximate 
difference in elevation 18,301 " +16 " 

Elevation above Fort Gibbon 18,446 ft. 

Elevation of Fort Gibbon 334 " 

Elevation above sea 18,780 ft. 



156 



CHAPTER VIII 

EXPLORATIONS OF THE DENALI RE- 

GION AND PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS 

AT ITS ASCENT 

THE first mention In literature of the greatest 
mountain group In North America Is in the 
narrative of that most notable navigator, George 
Vancouver. While surveying the Knik Arm of 
Cook's Inlet, In 1794, he speaks of his view of a 
connected mountain range "bounded by distant 
stupendous snow mountains covered with snow 
and apparently detached from each other." Van- 
couver's name has grown steadily greater during 
the last fifty years as modern surveys have shown 
the wonderful detailed accuracy of his work, and 
the seamen of the Alaskan coast speak of him as 
the prince of all navigators. 

Not until 1878 Is there another direct mention 
of these mountains, although the Russian name 
for Denali, "Bulshala Gora," proves that It had 
long been observed and known. 

In that year two of the early Alaskan traders, 
157 



The Ascent of Denali 

Alfred Mayo and Arthur Harper, made an ad- 
venturous journey some three hundred miles up 
the Tanana River, the first ascent of that river 
by white men, and upon their return reported 
finding gold in the bars and mentioned an enor- 
mous ice mountain visible in the south, which 
they said was one of the most remarkable things 
they had seen on their trip. 

In 1889 Frank Densmore, a prospector, with 
several companions, crossed from the Tanana to 
the Kuskokwim by way of the Coschaket and Lake 
Minchumina, and had the magnificent view of the 
Denali group which Lake Minchumina affords, 
which the present writer was privileged to have 
in 191 1. Densmore's description was so enthu- 
siastic that the mountain was known for years 
among the Yukon prospectors as "Densmore's 
mountain." 

Though unquestionably many men traversed 
the region after the discovery of gold in Cook's 
Inlet in 1894, no other public recorded mention of 
the great mountain was made until W. A. Dickey, 
a Princeton graduate, journeyed extensively In the 
Sushitna and Chulltna valleys in 1896 and reached 
the foot of the glacier which drains one of the 
flanks of Denali, called later by Doctor Cook the 
Ruth Glacier. Dickey described the mountain 

158 



Harper, Densmore, Dickey 

in a letter to the New York Sun in January, 1907, 
and guessed its height with remarkable accuracy 
at twenty thousand feet. Probably unaware that 
the mountain had any native name, Dickey gave 
it the name of the Republican candidate for Presi- 
dent of the United States at that time — McKin- 
ley. Says Mr. Dickey : "We named our great peak 
Mount McKinley, after WiUiam McKinley, of 
Ohio, the news of whose nomination for the presi- 
dency was the first we received on our way out 
of that wonderful wilderness." 

In 1898 George Eldridge and Robert Muldrow, 
of the United States Geological Survey, traversed 
the region, and Muldrow estimated the height of 
the mountain by triangulation at twenty thousand 
three hundred feet. 

In 1899 Lieutenant Herron crossed the range 
from Cook's Inlet and reached the Kuskokwim. 
It was he who named the lesser mountain of the 
Denali group, always known by the natives as 
Denali's Wife, "Mount Foraker," after the senator 
from Ohio. 

In 1902 Alfred Brooks and D. L. Raeburn made 
a remarkable reconnoissance survey from the 
Pacific Ocean, passing through the range and 
along the whole western and northwestern faces 
of the group. They were the first white men to 

159 



The Ascent of Denali 

set foot upon the slopes of Denali. Shortly after- 
ward, in response to the interest this journey 
aroused among Alpine clubs, Mr. Brooks published 
a pamphlet setting forth what he considered the 
most feasible plan for attempting the ascent of 
the mountain. 

The next year saw two actual attempts at as- 
cent. After holding the first term of court at 
Fairbanks, the new town on the Tanana River 
that had sprung suddenly into importance as the 
metropolis of Alaska upon the discovery of the 
Tanana gold-fields. Judge Wickersham (now dele- 
gate to Congress) set out with four men and two 
mules in May, 1903, and by steamboat ascended 
to the head of navigation of the Kantishna. Head- 
ing straight across an unknown country for the 
base of the mountain. Judge Wickersham's party 
unfortunately attacked the mountain by the 
Peters Glacier and demonstrated the impossibility 
of that approach, being stopped by the enor- 
mous ice-incrusted cliflFs of the North Peak. 
Judge Wickersham used to say that only by a 
balloon or a flying-machine could the summit be 
reached; and, indeed, by no other means can the 
summit ever be reached from the north face. 
After a week spent in climbing, provisions began 
to run short and the party returned, descending 

160 



Herron, Brooks, Wickersham 

the rushing, turbid waters of that quite unnavi- 
gable and very dangerous stream, the McKinley 
Fork of the Kantishna, on a raft, with little of 
anything left to eat, and that little damaged by 
water. Judge Wickersham was always keen for 
another attempt and often discussed the matter 
with the writer, but his judicial and political ac- 
tivities thenceforward occupied his time and at- 
tention to the exclusion of such enterprises. His 
attempt was the first ever made to climb the 
mountain. 



Doctor Cook's Attempts 

About the time that Judge Wickersham was 
leaving the north face of the mountain an expe- 
dition under Doctor Frederick A. Cook set out 
from Tyonek, on Cook's Inlet, on the other side 
of the range. Doctor Cook was accompanied by 
Robert Dunn, Ralph Shainwald (the "Hiram" 
of Dunn's narrative), and Fred Printz, who had 
been chief packer for Brooks and Raeburn, and 
fourteen pack-horses bore their supplies. The 
route followed was that of Brooks and Raeburn, 
and they had the advantage of topographical 
maps and forty miles of trail cut in the timber 
and a guide familiar with the country. Going up 

i6i 



The Ascent of Denali 

the Beluga and down the Skwentna Rivers, they 
crossed the range by the Simpson Pass to the south 
fork of the Kuskokwim, and then skirted the base 
of the mountains until a southwesterly ridge was 
reached which it is not very easy to locate, but 
which, as Doctor Brooks judges, must have been 
near the headwaters of the Tatlathna, a tributary 
of the Kuskokwim. Here an attempt was made 
to ascend the mountain, but at eight thousand 
feet a chasm cut them off from further advance. 
Pursuing their northeast course, they reached 
the Peters Glacier (which Doctor Cook calls the 
Hanna Glacier) and stumbled across one of Judge 
Wickersham's camps of a couple of months before. 
Here another attempt to ascend was made, only 
to find progress stopped by the same stupendous 
cliffs that had turned back the Wickersham party. 
"Over the glacier which comes from the gap be- 
tween the eastern and western peaks" (the North 
and South Peaks as we speak of them), says Doc- 
tor Cook, "there was a promising route." That is, 
indeed, part of the only route, but it can be reached 
only by the Muldrow Glacier. "The walls of the 
main mountain rise out of the Hanna (Peters) 
Glacier," Cook adds. The "main mountain" has 
many walls; the walls by which the summit alone 
may be reached rise out of the Muldrow Glacier, 

162 



Doctor Cook 

a circumstance that was not to be discovered for 
some years yet. 

The lateness of the season now compelled imme- 
diate return. Passing still along the face of the 
range in the same direction, the party crossed the 
terminal moraine of the Muldrow Glacier without 
recognizing that it affords the only highway to the 
heart of the great mountain and recrossed the 
range by an ice-covered pass to the waters of the 
Chulitna River, down which they rafted after 
abandoning their horses. Doctor Cook calls this 
pass "Harper Pass," and the name should stand, 
for Cook was probably the first man ever to use it. 

The chief result of this expedition, besides the 
exploration of about one hundred miles of un- 
known country, was the publication by Robert 
Dunn of an extraordinary narrative in several 
consecutive numbers of Outing., afterward repub- 
lished in book form, with some modifications, as 
"The Shameless Diary of an Explorer," a vivid 
but unpleasant production, for which every squab- 
ble and jealousy of the party furnishes literary 
material. The book has a curious, undeniable 
power, despite its brutal frankness and its striving 
after "the poor renown of being smart," and it 
may live. One is thankful, however, that it is 
unique in the literature of travel. 

163 



The Ascent of Denali 

Three years later Doctor Cook organized an 
expedition for a second attempt upon the moun- 
tain. In May, 1906, accompanied by Professor 
Herschel Parker, Mr. Belmore Browne, a topogra- 
pher named Porter, who made some valuable 
maps, and packers, the party landed at the head 
of Cook's Inlet and penetrated by motor-boat and 
by pack-train into the Sushitna country, south of 
the range. Faihng to cross the range at the head 
of the Yentna, they spent some time in explora- 
tions along the Kahilitna River, and, finding no 
avenue of approach to the heights of the moun- 
tain, the party returned to Cook's Inlet and 
broke up. 

With only one companion, a packer named 
Edward Barrille, Cook returned in the launch 
up the Chulitna River to the Tokositna late in 
August. *'We had already changed our mind as 
to the impossibility of climbing the mountain," 
he writes. Ascending a glacier which the To- 
kositna River drains, named by Cook the Ruth 
Glacier, they reached the amphitheatre at the 
glacier head. From this point, ''up and up to the 
heaven-scraped granite of the top, " Doctor Cook 
grows grandiloquent and vague, for at this point 
his true narrative ends. 

The claims that Doctor Cook made upon his 
• 164 



Doctor Cook and Robert Dunn 

return are well known, but it is quite impossible 
to follow his course from the description given in 
his book, "To the Top of the Continent." This 
much may be said: from the summit of the 
mountain, on a clear day, it seemed evident that 
no ascent was possible from the south side of the 
range at all. That was the judgment of all four 
members of our party. Doctor Cook talks about 
"the heaven-scraped granite of the top" and "the 
dazzhng whiteness of the frosted granite blocks," 
and prints a photograph of the top showing granite 
slabs. There is no rock of any kind on the South 
(the higher) Peak above nineteen thousand feet. 
The last one thousand five hundred feet of the 
mountain is all permanent snow and ice; nor is 
the conformation of the summit in the least like 
the photograph printed as the "top of Mt. 
McKinley." In his account of the view from the 
summit he speaks of "the ice-Mink caused by the 
extensive glacial sheets north of the Saint Ehas 
group," which would surely be out of the range 
of any possible vision, but does not mention at 
all the master sight that bursts upon the eye 
when the summit is actually gained — the great 
mass of "Denali's Wife," or Mount Foraker, fill- 
ing all the middle distance. We were all agreed 
that no one who had ever stood on the top of 

165 



The Ascent of Denali 

Denali in clear weather could fail to mention the 
sudden splendid sight of this great mountain. 

But it is not worth while to pursue the subject 
further. The present writer feels confident that 
any man who climbs to the top of Denali, and then 
reads Doctor Cook's account of his ascent, will 
not need Edward Barrille's affidavit to convince 
him that Cook's narrative is untrue. Indigna- 
tion is, however, swallowed up in pity when one 
thinks upon the really excellent pioneering and 
exploring work done by this man, and realizes 
that the immediate success of the imposition 
about the ascent of Denali doubtless led to the 
more audacious imposition about the discovery of 
the North Pole — and that to his discredit and 
downfall. 

The Pioneer Ascent 

Although Cook's claim to have reached the sum- 
mit of Denali met with general acceptance out- 
side, or at least was not openly scouted, it was 
otherwise in Alaska. The men, in particular, who 
lived and worked in the placer-mining regions 
about the base of the mountain, and were, per- 
haps, more familiar with the orography of the 
range than any surveyor or professed topographer, 

1 66 



Doctor Cook 

were openly incredulous. Upon the appearance 
of Doctor Cook's book, "To the Top of the Conti- 
nent," in 1908, the writer well remembers the 
eagerness with which his copy (the only one in 
Fairbanks) was perused by man after man from 
the Kantishna diggings, and the acute way in 
which they detected the place where vague "fine 
writing" began to be substituted for definite 
description. 

Some of these men, convinced that the ascent 
had never been made, conceived the purpose of 
proving it in the only way in which it could be 
proved — by making the ascent themselves. They 
were confident that an enterprise which had now 
baffled several parties of "scientists," equipped 
with all sorts of special apparatus, could be accom- 
plished by Alaskan "sourdoughs" with no special 
equipment at all. There seems also to have en- 
tered into the undertaking a naive notion that in 
some way or other large money reward would fol- 
low a successful ascent. 

The enterprise took form under Thomas Lloyd, 
who managed to secure the financial backing of 
McPhee and Petersen, saloon-keepers of Fair- 
banks, and Griffin, a wholesale liquor dealer of 
Chena. These three men are said to have put 
up five hundred dollars apiece, and the sum 

167 



The Ascent of Denali 

thus raised sufficed for the needs of the party. 
In February, 1910, therefore, Thomas Lloyd, 
Charles McGonoglll, William Taylor, Peter An- 
derson, and Bob Home, all experienced prospec- 
tors and miners, and E. C. Davidson, a surveyor, 
now the surveyor-general of Alaska, set out from 
Fairbanks, and by 1st March had established a 
base camp at the mouth of Cache Creek, within 
the foot-hills of the range. 

Here Davidson and Home left the party after 
a disagreement with Lloyd. The loss of David- 
son was a fatal blow to anything beyond a "sport- 
ing" ascent, for he was the only man in the party 
with any scientific bent, or who knew so much as 
the manipulation of a photographic camera. 

The Lloyd expedition was the first to discover 
the only approach by which the mountain may 
be climbed. Mr. Alfred Brooks, Mr. Robert 
Muldrow, and Doctor Cook had passed the 
snout of the Muldrow Glacier without realizing 
that it turned and twisted and led up until it 
gave access to the ridge by which alone the upper 
glacier or Grand Basin can be reached and the 
summits gained. From observations while hunt- 
ing mountain-sheep upon the foot-hills for years 
past, Lloyd had already satisfied himself of this 
prime fact; had found the key to the complicated 

168 



The Sourdough Climb 

orography of the great mass. Lloyd had pre- 
viously crossed the range with horses in this neigh- 
borhood by an easy pass that led "from willows 
to willows" in eighteen miles. Pete Anderson 
had come into the Kantishna country this way 
and had crossed and recrossed the range by this 
pass no less than eleven times. 

McGonogill, following quartz leads upon the 
high mountains of Moose Creek, had traced from 
his aerie the course of the Muldrow Glacier, and 
had satisfied himself that within the walls of that 
glacier the route would be found. And, indeed, 
when he had us up there and pointed out the long 
stretch of the parallel walls it was plain to us 
also that they held the road to the heights. From 
the point where he had perched his tiny hut, a 
stone's throw from his tunnel, how splendidly the 
mountain rose and the range stretched out! 

These men thus started with the great advan- 
tage of a knowledge of the mountain, and their 
plan for chmbing it was the first that contained 
the possibility of success. 

From the base camp Anderson and McGonogill 
scouted among the foot-hills of the range for some 
time before they discovered the pass that gives 
easy access to the Muldrow Glacier. On 25th 
March the party had traversed the glacier and 

169 



The Ascent of Denali 

reached its head with dogs and supplies. A camp 
was made on the ridge, while further prospect- 
ing was carried on toward the upper glacier. This 
was the farthest point that Lloyd reached. On 
loth April, Taylor, Anderson, and McGonogill 
set out about two in the morning with great climb- 
ing-irons strapped to their moccasins and hooked 
pike-poles in their hands. Disdaining the rope and 
cutting no steps, it was "every man for himself," 
with reliance solely upon the crampons. They 
went up the ridge to the Grand Basin, crossed the 
ice to the North Peak, and proceeded to climb it, 
carrying the fourteen-foot flagstaff with them. 
Within perhaps five hundred feet of the summit, 
McGonogill, outstripped by Taylor and Anderson, 
and fearful of the return over the slippery ice- 
incrusted rocks if he went farther, turned back, 
but Taylor and Anderson reached the top (about 
twenty thousand feet above the sea) and firmly 
planted the flagstaff, which is there yet. 

This is the true narrative of a most extraor- 
dinary feat, unique — the writer has no hesitation 
in claiming — in all the annals of mountaineering. 
He has been at the pains of talking with every 
member of the actual climbing party with a view 
to sifting the matter thoroughly. 

For, largely by the fault of these men them- 
170 



Lloyd and McGonogill 

selves, through a mistaken though not unchival- 
rous sense of loyalty to the organizer of the expe- 
dition, much incredulity was aroused in Alaska 
touching their exploit. It was most unfortunate 
that any mystery was made about the details, 
most unfortunate that in the newspaper accounts 
false claims were set up. Surely the merest com- 
mon sense should have dictated that in the ac- 
count of an ascent undertaken with the prime 
purpose of proving that Doctor Cook had ?iot 
made the ascent, and had falsified his narrative, 
everything should be frank and aboveboard; but 
it was not so. 

A narrative, gathered from Lloyd himself and 
agreed to by the others, was reduced to writing 
by Mr. W. E. Thompson, an able journaHst of 
Fairbanks, and was sold to a newspaper syndi- 
cate. The account the writer has examined was 
"featured" in the New York Sunday Times of the 
5th June, 1910. 

In that account Lloyd is made to claim un- 
equivocally that he himself reached both sum- 
mits of the mountain. "There were two summits 
and we climbed them both"; and again, "When I 
reached the coast summit" are reported in quota- 
tion marks as from his lips. As a matter of fact, 
Lloyd himself reached neither summit, nor was 

171 



The Ascent of Denali 

much above the glacier floor; and the south or 
coast summit, the higher of the two, was not at- 
tempted by the part)^ at all. There is no question 
that the party could have climbed the South 
Peak, though by reason of its greater distance it 
is safe to say that it could not have been reached, 
as the North Peak was, in one march from the 
ridge camp. It must have involved a camp in 
the Grand Basin with all the delay and the labor 
of relaying the stuff up there. But the men who 
accomplished the astonishing feat of climbing the 
North Peak, in one almost superhuman march 
from the saddle of the Northeast Ridge, could most 
certainly have climbed the South Peak too. 

They did not attempt it for two reasons, first, 
because they wanted to plant their fourteen-foot 
flagstaff where it could be seen through a tele- 
scope from Fairbanks, one hundred and fifty miles 
away, as they fondly supposed, and, second, be- 
cause not until they had reached the summit of 
the North Peak did they realize that the South 
Peak is higher. They told the writer that upon 
their return to the floor of the upper glacier they 
were greatly disappointed to find that their flag- 
staff was not visible to them. It is, indeed, only 
just visible with the naked eye from certain points 
on the upper glacier and quite invisible at any 

172 



The North Peak 

lower or more distant point. Walter Harper has 
particularly keen sight, and he was well up in the 
Grand Basin, at nearly seventeen thousand feet 
altitude, sitting and scanning the sky-line of the 
North Peak, seeking for the pole, when he caught 
sight of it and pointed it out. The writer was 
never sure that he saw it with the naked eye, 
though Karstens and Tatum did so as soon as 
Walter pointed it out, but through the field-glasses 
it was plain and prominent and unmistakable. 

When we came down to the Kantishna diggings 
and announced to the men who planted it that 
we had seen the flagstaff, there was a feeling ex- 
pressed that the climbing party of the previous 
summer must have seen it also and had suppressed 
mention of it; but there is no ground whatever 
for such a damaging assumption. It would never 
be seen with the naked eye save by those who 
were intently searching for it. Professor Parker 
and Mr. Belmore Browne entertained the pretty 
general increduUty about the "Pioneer" ascent, 
perhaps too readily, certainly too confidently; but 
the men themselves must bear the chief blame for 
that. The writer and his party, knowing these 
men much better, had never doubt that some of 
them had accomphshed what was claimed, and 
these details have been gone into for no other rea- 

173 



The Ascent of Denali 

son than that honor may at last be given where 
honor is due. 

To Lloyd belongs the honor of conceiving and 
organizing the attempt but not of accompHshing 
it. To him probably also belongs the original dis- 
covery of the route that made the ascent possible. 
To McGonogill belongs the credit of discovering 
the pass, probably the only pass, by which the 
glacier may be reached without following it from 
its snout up, a long and difficult journey; and 
to him also the credit of cHmbing some nineteen 
thousand five hundred feet, or to within five hun- 
dred feet of the North Peak. But to Pete Ander- 
son and Billy Taylor, two of the strongest men, 
physically, in all the North, and to none other, 
belongs the honor of the first ascent of the North 
Peak and the planting of what must assuredly be 
the highest flagstaff in the world. The North 
Peak has never since been climbed or attempted. 



In the summer of the same year, 1910, Professor 
Parker and Mr. Belmore Browne, members of the 
second Cook party, convinced by this time that 
Cook's claim was wholly unfounded, attempted 
the mountain again, and another party, organized 
by Mr. C. E. Rust, of Portland, Oregon, also en- 

174 



Pete Anderson and Billy Taylor 

deavored the ascent. But both these expeditions 
confined themselves to the hopeless southern side 
of the range, from which, in all probability, the 
mountain never can be climbed. 



The Parker-Browne Expedition 

To a man living in the interior of Alaska, aware 
of the outfitting and transportation facilities which 
the large commerce of Fairbanks affords, aware 
of the navigable waterways that penetrate close to 
the foot-hills of the Alaskan range, aware also of 
the amenities of the interior slope with its dry, 
mild climate, its abundance of game and rich 
pasturage compared with the trackless, lifeless 
snows of the coast slopes, there seems a strange 
fatuity in the persistent efforts to approach the 
mountain from the southern side of the range. 

It is morally certain that if the only expedition 
that remains to be dealt with — that organized by 
Professor Parker and Mr. Belmore Browne in 191 2, 
which came within an ace of success — had ap- 
proached the mountain from the interior instead 
of from the coast, it would have forestalled us 
and accomplished the first complete ascent. 

The difficulties of the coast approach have been 
described graphically enough by Robert Dunn in 

175 



The Ascent of Denali 

the summer and by Belmore Browne himself in the 
winter. There are no trails; the snow lies deep 
and loose and falls continually, or else the whole 
country is bog and swamp. There is no game. 

The Parker-Browne expedition left Seward, on 
Resurrection Baj^, late in January, 191 2, and after 
nearly three months' travel, relaying their stuff 
forward, they crossed the range under extreme 
difficulties, being seventeen days above any veg- 
etation, and reached the northern face of the 
mountain on 25th March. The expedition either 
missed the pass near the foot of the Muldrow 
Glacier, well known to the Kantishna miners, by 
which it is possible to cross from willows to willows 
in eighteen miles, or else avoided it in the vain 
hope of finding another. They then went to the 
Kantishna diggings and procured supplies and 
topographical information from the miners, and 
were thus able to follow the course of the Lloj'd 
party of 1910, reaching the Muldrow Glacier by the 
gap in the glacier wall discovered by McGonogill 
and named McPhee Pass by him. 

Mr. Belmore Browne has written a lucid and 
stirring account of the ascent which his party 
made. We were fortunate enough to secure a 
copy of the magazine in which it appeared just 
before leaving Fairbanks, and he had been good 

176 



Parker and Browne 

enough to write a letter in response to our inquiries 
and to enclose a sketch map. Our course was 
almost precisely the same as that of the Parker- 
Browne party up to seventeen thousand feet, and 
the course of that party was precisely the same as 
that of the Lloyd party up to fifteen thousand feet. 
There is only one way up the mountain, and Lloyd 
and his companions discovered it. The earth- 
quake had enormously increased the labor of the 
ascent; it had not altered the route. 

A reconnoissance of the Muldrow Glacier to its 
head and a long spell of bad weather delayed the 
party so much that it was the 4th June before the 
actual ascent was begun — a very late date indeed; 
more than a month later than our date and nearly 
three months later than the "Pioneer" date. It 
is rarely that the mountain is clear after the ist 
June; almost all the summer through its summit 
is wrapped in cloud. From the junction of the 
Tanana and Yukon Rivers it is often visible for 
weeks at a time during the winter, but is rarely 
seen at all after the ice goes out. A close watch 
kept by friends at Tanana (the town at the con- 
fluence of the rivers) discovered the summit on 
the day we reached it and the following day (the 
7th and 8th June) but not for three weeks before 
and not at all afterward; from which it does not 

177 



The Ascent of Denali 

follow, however, that the summit was not visible 
momentarily, or at certain hours of the day, but 
only that it was not visible for long enough to 
be observed. The rapidity with which that sum- 
mit shrouds and clears itself is sometimes marvel- 
lous. 

As is well known, the Parker-Browne party 
pushed up the Northeast Ridge and the upper 
glacier and made a first attack upon the summit 
itself, from a camp at seventeen thousand feet, on 
the 29th June. When within three or four hun- 
dred feet of the top they were overwhelmed and 
driven down, half frozen, by a blizzard that sud- 
denly arose. On the ist July another attempt 
was made, but the clouds ascended and com- 
pletely enveloped the party in a cold, wind-driven 
mist so that retreat to camp was again imper- 
ative. Only those who have experienced bad 
weather at great heights can understand how im- 
possible it is to proceed in the face of it. The 
strongest, the hardiest, the most resolute must 
yield. The party could linger no longer; food 
supplies were exhausted. They broke camp and 
went down the mountain. 

The falling short of complete success of this 
very gallant mountaineering attempt seems to 
have been due, first to the mistake of approaching 

178 



Parker and Browne 

the mountain by the most difficult route, so that 
it was more than five months after starting that 
the actual climbing began; or, if the survey made 
justified, and indeed decided, the route, then 
the summit was sacrificed to the survey. But 
the immediate cause of the failure was the mis- 
take of relying upon canned pemmican for the 
main food supply. This provision, hauled with 
infinite labor from the coast, and carried on the 
backs of the party to the high levels of the moun- 
tain, proved uneatable and useless at the very 
time when it was depended upon for subsistence. 
There is no finer big-game country in the world 
than that around the interior slopes of the Alaskan 
range; there is no finer meat in the world than 
caribou and mountain-sheep. It is carrying coals 
to Newcastle to bring canned meat into this 
country — nature's own larder stocked with her 
choicest supplies. But if, attempting the moun- 
tain when they did, the Parker-Browne party had 
remained two or three days longer in the Grand 
Basin, which they would assuredly have done had 
their food been eatable, their bodies would be 
lying up there yet or would be crushed beneath 
the debris of the earthquake on the ridge. 



179 



CHAPTER IX 

THE NAMES PLACED UPON THE 
MOUNTAIN BY THE AUTHOR 

THERE was no intent of putting names at 
all upon any portions of this mountain 
when the expedition was undertaken, save that 
the author had it in his mind to honor the mem- 
ory of a very noble and very notable gentlewoman 
who gave ten years of her Hfe to the Alaskan na- 
tives, set on foot one of the most successful edu- 
cational agencies in the interior, and died sud- 
denly and heroically at her post of duty a few 
years since, leaving a broad and indelible mark 
upon the character of a generation of Indians. 
Miss Farthing lies buried high up on the bluffs 
opposite the school at Nenana, in a spot she was 
wont to visit for the fine view of Denali it com- 
mands, and her brother, the present bishop of 
Montreal, and some of her colleagues of the 
Alaskan mission, have set a concrete cross there. 
When we entered the Alaskan range by Cache 
Creek there rose directly before us a striking py- 

i8o 



Tower, Pass, and Ridge 

ramidal peak, some twelve or thirteen thousand 
feet high. Not knowing that any name had been 
bestowed upon it, the author discharged himself 
of the duty that he conceived lay upon him of as- 
sociating Miss Farthing's name permanently with 
the mountain range she loved and the country 
in which she labored. But he has since learned 
that Professor Parker placed upon this mountain, 
a year before, the name of Alfred Brooks, of 
the Alaskan Geological Survey. Apart from the 
priority of naming, to which, of course, he would 
immediately yield, the author knows of no one 
whose name should so fitly be placed upon a 
peak of the Alaskan range, and he would himself 
resist any effort to change it. 

Having gratified this desire, as he supposed, 
there had meantime arisen another desire, — upon 
reading the narrative of the Parker-Browne ex- 
pedition of the previous year, a copy of which 
we were fortunate enough to procure just as we 
were starting for the mountain. It was the feel- 
ing of our whole company that the names of 
Professor Parker and Mr. Belmore Browne should 
be associated with the mountain they so very 
nearly ascended. 

When the eyes are cast aloft from the head of 
the Muldrow Glacier the most conspicuous fea- 

i8i 



The Ascent of Denali 

ture of the view is a rudely conical tower of 
granite, standing sentinel over the entrance to 
the Grand Basin, and at the base of that tower 
is the pass into the upper glacier which is, in- 
deed, the key of the whole ascent of the moun- 
tain. (See illustration opposite p. 40.) 

We found no better place to set these names; 
we called the tower the Browne Tower and the 
pass the Parker Pass. Thfe "pass" may not, it 
is true, conform to any strict Alpine definition 
of that term, but it gives the only access to the 
glacier floor. From the ridge below to the glacier 
above this place gives passage; and any place 
that gives passage may broadly be termed a pass. 

It was when this pass had been reached, after 
three weeks' toil, that the author was moved to 
the bestowal of another name by his admiration 
for the skill and pluck and perseverance of his 
chief colleague in the ascent. Those who think 
that a long apprenticeship must be served under 
skilled instructors before command of the tech- 
nique of snow mountaineering can be obtained 
would have been astonished at Karstens's work 
on the Northeast Ridge. But it must be kept in 
mind that, while he had no previous experience 
on the heights, he had many years of experience 
with ice and snow — which is true of all of us ex- 

182 



Glacier 

cept Tatum, and he had two winters' experience. 
In the course of winter travel in the interior of 
Alaska most of the problems of snow mountain- 
eering present themselves at one time or another. 
The designation *'Northeast,"which the Parker- 
Browne party put upon the ridge that affords 
passage from the lower glacier to the upper, is 
open to question. Mr. Charles Sheldon, who 
spent a year around the base of the mountain 
studying the fauna of the region, refers to the 
outer wall of the Muldrow Glacier as the North- 
east Ridge, that is, the wall that rises to the 
North Peak. Perhaps "East Ridge of the South 
Peak" would be the most exact description. But 
it is here proposed to substitute Harry Karstens's 
name for points-of-the-compass designations, and 
call the ridge, part of which the earthquake 
shattered, the dividing ridge between the two 
arms of the Muldrow Glacier, soaring tre- 
mendously and impressively with ice-incrusted 
cliffs in its lower course, the Karstens Ridge. Re- 
garded in its whole extent, it is one of the capital 
features of the mountain. It is seen to the left 
in the picture opposite page 26, where Karstens 
stands alone. At this point of its course it soars 
to its greatest elevation, five or six thousand 
feet above the glacier floor; it is seen again in 

183 



The Ascent of Denali 

the middle distance of the picture opposite page 
164. 

Not until this book was in preparation and the 
author was digging into the literature of the 
mountain did he discover the interesting connec- 
tion of Arthur Harper, father of Walter Harper, 
narrated in another place, with Denali, and not 
until that discovery did he think of suggesting 
the name Harper for any feature of the mountain, 
despite the distinction that fell to the young man 
of setting the first foot upon the summit. Then 
the upper glacier appeared to be the most appro- 
priate place for the name, and, after reflection, it 
is deemed not improper to ask that this glacier 
be so known. 

It has thus fallen out that each of the author's 
colleagues is distinguished by some name upon 
the mountain except Robert Tatum. But to 
Tatum belongs the honor of having raised the 
stars and stripes for the first time upon the 
highest point in all the territory governed by the 
United States; and he is well content with that 
distinction. Keen as the keenest amongst us to 
reach the top, Tatum had none the less been 
entirely willing to give it up and go down to the 
base camp and let Johnny take his place (when 
he was unwell at the head of the glacier owing 

184 



Horns of the South Peak 

to long confinement in the tent during bad 
weather), if in the judgment of the writer that 
had been the wisest course for the whole party. 
Fortunately the indisposition passed, and the mat- 
ter is referred to only as indicating the spirit of 
the man. I suppose there is no money that could 
buy from him the Httle silk flag he treasures. 

It was also while this book was preparing that 
the author found that he had unwittingly re- 
named Mount Brooks, and the prompt with- 
drawal of his suggested name for that peak left 
the one original desire of naming a feature of the 
mountain or the range ungratified, and his obli- 
gation toward a revered memory unfulfilled. 

Where else might that name be placed .f* For 
a long time no place suggested itself; then it 
was called to mind that the two horns at the 
extremities of the horseshoe ridge of the South 
Peak were unnamed. Here were twin peaks, 
small, yet lofty and conspicuous — part of the 
main summit of the mountain. The naming of 
one almost carried with it the naming of the 
other; and as soon as the name Farthing alighted, 
so to speak, from his mind upon the one, the 
name Carter settled itself upon the other. In 
the long roll of women who have labored devot- 
edly for many years amongst the natives of the 

185 



The Ascent of Denali 

interior of Alaska, there are no brighter names 
than those of Miss Annie Farthing and Miss 
Clara Carter, the one forever associated with Ne- 
nana, the other with the AUakaket. To those 
who are familiar with what has been done and 
what is doing for the Indians of the interior, to 
the white men far and wide who have owed re- 
covery of health and relief and refreshment to 
the ministrations of these capable women, this 
naming will need no labored justification; and if 
self-sacrifice and love, and tireless, patient labor 
for the good of others be indeed the greatest 
things in the world, then the mountain top bear- 
ing aloft these names does not so much do honor 
as is itself dignified and ennobled. These horns 
of the South Peak are shown in the picture op- 
posite page 96; they are of almost equal height; 
the near one the author would name the Farthing 
Horn, the far one the Carter Horn. 

And now the author finds that he has done 
what, in the past, he has faulted others for doing 
— he has plastered a mountain with names. The 
prerogative of name-giving is a dangerous one, 
without definite laws or limitations. Nothing but 
common consent and usage ultimately establish 
names, but he to whom falls the first exploration 
of a country, or the first ascent of a peak, is usu- 

186 



Denali and His Wife 

ally accorded privilege of nomenclature. Yet it 
is a privilege that is often abused and should be 
exercised with reserve. Whether or not it has 
been overdone in the present case, others must 
say. This, however, the author will say, and 
would say as emphatically as is in his power: 
that he sets no store whatever by the names 
he has ventured to confer comparable with that 
which he sets by the restoration of the ancient 
native names of the whole great mountain and 
its companion peak. 

It may be that the Alaskan Indians are doomed; 
it may be that the liquor and disease which to-day 
are working havoc amongst them will destroy 
them off the face of the earth; it is common to 
meet white men who assume it with complacency. 
Those who are fighting for the natives with all 
their hearts and souls do not beheve it, cannot 
believe it, cannot believe that this will be the 
end of all their efforts, that any such blot will 
foul the escutcheon of the United States. But if 
it be so, let at least the memorial of their names 
remain. When the inhabited wilderness has be- 
come an uninhabited wilderness, when the only 
people who will ever make their homes in it are 
exterminated, when the placer-gold is gone and 
the white men have gone also, when the last in- 

187 



The Ascent of Denali 

terlor Alaskan town is like Diamond City and 
Glacier City and Bearpaw City and Roosevelt 
City; and Bettles and Rampart and Coldfoot; 
and Cleary City and Delta City and Vault City 
and a score of others; let at least the native 
names of these great mountains remain to show 
that there once dwelt in the land a simple, hardy 
race who braved successfully the rigors of its 
climate and the inhospitality of their environ- 
ment and flourished, until the septic contact of a 
superior race put corruption into their blood. So 
this book shall end as it began. 



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